WRITING: Gravity (Chapter 2)

[phantastus]

Title: GRAVITY
Chapter: 2 (Capsize)
Author: phantastus
Fandom: Silent Hill
Rating: R (see 'Disclaimer/Warnings' for content)
Genre: Horror/Drama
Main characters: James Sunderland, Laura
Summary: Free of the Otherworld but feeling lost, James chooses to seek comfort in his old standby before leaving town-- and is unexpectedly thrust into a harrowing situation in which his choices could mean the difference between life and death for someone he already failed once.
Notes: Chapter 2 of my ongoing, obscenely long SH2 fanfic. Set directly after the Leave Ending, but contains heavy implications of In Water. The fic is mirrored over here along with eight subsequent chapters, but I will be posting the most up-to-date edits here for the time being.
This story was initially written (and is still in progress) for NaNoWriMo 2009.
Disclaimer/Warnings: In keeping with canon, this fanfic depicts events and situations that may be considered violent or cruel. This chapter deals with extremely disturbing concepts and should be read with this in mind. These concepts include but may not be limited to:

-written descriptions of physical wounds
-traumatic flashbacks to monsters and shit
-pedophilia/threats of a sexual nature against a minor
-misogynistic and sexist language
-violence
-harmful enabling of such behavior
-mentions of drug use
-religion, cults, and brainwashing
-gross, pervy old men
-James being both more and less useless than normal
-SILENT HILL IN GENERAL

Please read at your own risk.

Recommended Listening:
-Set the Fire to the Third Bar
-Crawl Claw and Scrape
-Burn it to the Ground
-Opiate

(The illustration above can be viewed in full here.)




Chapter 2: Capsize




James remembered where the pub was.

How pathetic was that? He’d never even been inside it but, like clockwork, when the turn-off approached, he slowed and pulled into the lot as though he’d done it a million times. Even at this early hour, it was far more crowded than the one by the observation deck—with enormous cargo trucks looming around its edge like rough walls. Alcoholism transcended time of day, it seemed.

It didn’t really surprise him much that he remembered. It had just gotten that way over time. He was fairly sure he knew the location of every single bar within ten miles of the state’s border, whether he’d been to any of them or not. As the months had worn on and Mary had spent more and more time in that hospital, James had in turn found himself more and more reluctant to stay in that dark, lonely house at night.

The first few times he’d gone, it had been nice enough. It had been a sad, lonely little place, that first bar. But misery loved company, and there was company aplenty. The tenders were kind listeners and so were the other men there, all of whom had stories of their own to tell, and all of those stories as sad and lonely as they were. Some whose wives had left them, some whose wives had left them and taken the children, and some whose wives had died. Like his was going to.

Before then, aside from nurturing persistent alcohol cravings as a teenager (those had gone away for the most part once he met Mary…), he had never been the sort of man who drank a lot. He had never been the sort of man who drowned his sorrows in a bar. It was all fuzzy now, of course, but he was pretty sure he’d broken down and sobbed like a little baby in front of everyone there within the first few nights of becoming that man.

No one there had judged him for it, and as he went more and more, he’d gotten the impression that they’d all been there at some point, too.

Addiction had welcomed him back with warm, open arms and soon every night Mary wasn’t at home was a night spent with his head down on the shiny surface of a polished countertop and a cold bottle resting against his cheek, and perhaps, sometimes, with a few large, comforting hands patting him on the back and telling the tender that they might wanna call a taxi for poor ol’ Jim soon, he’s had his fill for tonight.

And it was fine.

Until they had started treating him like a regular.

As his nights there had grown in number, the others had started talking to him like a friend rather than an acquaintance, asking him sympathetically on sight how Mary was doing, how he was coping, et cetera and ad nauseum.

And that had scared the living daylights out of him.

The other men had, with little exception, all been older than he was, with saggy bags under their eyes and around the corners of their lips that made them look even older than that. They had beer guts and sad bloodshot eyes and clammy, ashen faces that didn’t just show how much sorrow they’d seen, but screamed it.

James had turned to drink to escape from the lonely prison of a nightmare that had become his everyday life, but seeing the people who he was terrified of becoming, getting to know them on a first-name basis… well, that just destroyed the entire point. They knew it, too. He’d been able to see it in their eyes. Every time they looked at him, this pitiful wreck of a young man, barely even half a decade past legal drinking age to begin with, already drinking himself into oblivion over a dying woman they had never even met… they knew.

They had felt sorry for him.

They were sorry for him because in him, they had seen themselves back when they had only just started to learn that life was cruel and didn’t care if you were young and happy, and they were sorry for him because they knew the truth that he didn’t want to accept: that within a few years, he was going to be just like them.

And though they never said it out loud, being able to tell that even those sad and broken old men felt pity for him… well, he just hadn’t been able to handle that.

He’d still wanted to try and pretend that this was only temporary, that he was only wallowing in cheap booze and five o’clock shadows with these poor suckers for a little while, until Mary got better, and then everything would go back to normal.

So he’d stopped going to that bar.

Learned the names and addresses of them all by heart, only went to each one until the day came when someone there looked up from their glass and said: ‘Hey, it’s Jimmy Sunderland! How are things, son? You coping?’ And then he never went back.

And so it had gone for three long years.

A bell tinkled dimly overhead somewhere as he opened the door and stepped inside.

It looked no different than any of the other dozens of slightly-out-of-the-way pubs he’d been in, apart from perhaps the decorations adorning the walls, which were more befitting of the rural location. Mounted fish, photos of oldster locals and the ever-present Lake Toluca. One showed a church, half-built. The shades were drawn so that the room would be dark enough to excuse burning those neon lights by the counter all day long, emulating that nighttime atmosphere that James had learned just about all bars had—or at least the kinds he’d always gone to. People tended to drink more when they couldn’t see how light it was outside.

No heads turned when he walked in. That was fine. Better that way, in fact.

Still feeling the drag on his left leg, he shuffled his way towards the bar between tables housing face-down loners who were lost in other worlds, stewing in their own sweat. The clock on the wall said that it was the middle of the afternoon, so there would be no bar-goers there who were actually looking for a good time. A few strains of raucous laughter could be heard over in the dark corner by the payphones, but James ignored them. Truckers, probably. He couldn’t remember exactly when, but somewhere along the line, he vaguely recalled hearing something about how this route was often used on supply runs by a lot of the big transport companies. No traffic and a scenic drive—what more could you ask for when all you had going for you was a job moving loads of crap from one place to another?

No wonder they were laughing.

But apart from them, the folks here now were of the sort that James had spent his time with back then. The bleeding hearts and broken hearts and sometimes the hearts that were so drowned in alcohol that their owners had yellow eye-whites and probably weren’t long for the world.

James passed them all without any attempt to make eye contact, on his part or theirs.

A lone tender was behind the counter, his back turned for the moment as he pinged one of the neon lights with a finger to get it to stop buzzing and flickering. It was bright pink, making up a portion of the dress of one of those stereotypical lying-woman shapes. It was a familiar one—James was pretty sure he’d seen the same darn neon woman just hours before in every bar he’d ever been to. He didn’t like looking at them. The curves just reminded him of what he couldn’t have anymore.

The pink light glinted off of the gold rings that pinched through the tender’s ears, one in each. It also reflected nicely off of his head, which was mostly bald and looked smooth as snakeskin. The rosy reflection slid across his lightly-lined brow like oil as he turned around at the scrape of wood on the floor. James had pulled a stool away from the bar and lowered himself gingerly onto it. As soon as he was facing him, the tender’s thin brows went straight up at the sight of the bloodied bandages and marks of violence scattered across James’s face.

It was nowhere near as horrified a reaction as the tourist’s—if anything, the surprise was accompanied by something almost analytical. A subtly-piercing look in the eyes that said Well, well. What have we here?

And then it disappeared under the normal, blank façade that anyone in a position of customer service perfects by osmosis over the years.

He slapped a dishcloth over one shoulder and regarded James with an unreadable expression, as though he hadn’t just been sizing him up like one dog does to another through the holes in a chainlink fence.

“That’s a nice pair of shiners you got there, buddy. Is this a story I’m gonna hear at some point tonight?” His voice was easy and open, but something about his smile just didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“No,” said James bluntly. He had long since trained himself out of that embarrassing tendency to sob out all his troubles onto the nearest shoulder as soon as he had a beer in him, no matter how much he wanted to. Eventually the number of bars within reasonable driving distance where he could still be a stranger had begun to dwindle, and from that point onward, the easiest solution to conserve the number remaining was to clam up, stop being ‘poor Jimmy’ and start being ‘that sullen bastard in the corner who won’t talk to anybody’.

Not looking particularly discouraged, the tender shrugged nonchalantly.

“Not much of a talker? That’s fine. Pick your poison.” He gestured to the wide array of green and amber glass behind him, a sly grin crossing his face as he added, “Or medicine, as I prefer to call it.”

“Just a beer. Don’t care what kind. Whatever’s cheapest,” James said, deliberately failing to respond to the barely-concealed conversation prompt. He slumped down on the stool, deliberately avoiding eye-contact with the tender and trying not to think about the fact that the seat of his pants was still wet.

The whole thing was scripted, and not just the tender’s blatant catchphrase. What James himself had just said was a line he’d uttered hundreds of times before, to dozens of other bartenders. And even now, after everything, it had sprung to his lips with an uncanny smoothness where anything else would have come out in a jolting stutter. As though he hadn’t been back to Silent Hill at all and this was just another day in another bar. Even his expression had slipped back into its customary scowl, the one he’d once had to force but now leaped right back onto his features and made itself at home there.

It was still a mask, though—a protective little barrier between his real self and the rest of the world. He shouldn’t have needed it anymore, but he’d needed it for so long and he wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t still need it now.

Glass clunked against wood as the bottle was set down in front of him. He kept his eyes on the edge of the counter as he reached out to grasp its neck and uncap it. That used to be something he always fumbled with, but no more. Not after three whole years. It was just ingrained now, like being able to tie his shoes.

The bottle’s contents tasted horrible. So sour they made his mouth pucker and left a nasty aftertaste like mouthwash. But that was the danger of asking for whatever was cheapest and James no longer complained when he was passed something that tasted like it had been fermented in someone’s toilet bowl. For all he knew, he could have just been given a sloppily-brewed bottle of amateur moonshine with twice the lead content of a box of powdered baby formula from China, but he wouldn’t know, because he didn’t even care enough to look at the label. Taste wasn’t the point.

He scrunched his face as the caustic stuff ploughed a stinging trail down his throat, waiting for the burn to fade.

Usually his cold demeanor and the immediacy with which he started doping himself up with his legal, liquid drug was enough to make any curious server leave him alone. But even as he sat with his head bowed, he could feel the tender’s eyes on him and see the reflection of his white dress shirt on the shiny countertop in front of him.

Having calmed somewhat since his strenuous trek to the overlook and the weird blackout on the rail, James’s heart started to pump once more. There had once been a time when the mere thought of someone watching him wasn’t enough to instill flutterings of panic in him, but that felt like a long, long time ago. Swallowing and feeling the sore flesh around his neck twinge, he lifted his head just enough to stare across the bar through the fringe of drying dirty-blond hair that he was too tired to scrub out of his face.

Sure enough, the ear-ringed man was still standing directly across from him, regarding him with an expression of vague curiosity from those oddly-piercing eyes. Waiting to see what he would do.

Slow, smoky twinges of discomfort started to fill James like rising bile, but, perhaps because of the disgusting taste still coating his mouth, there was a dull flare of annoyance as well. He knew why he’d been passed the bad bottle now.

His eyes narrowed slightly. He had no idea why the tender wouldn’t leave him alone, or what kind of fight he wanted to pick, but he didn’t want to deal with it, whatever it was. Not removing his eyes from the watching man, James lifted the bottle to his lips and took a good, long swig—ignoring the gag reflex that threatened to send it all back up.

Then he stared.

James Sunderland was not and never had been a confrontational person, so it actually took a bit of effort to do that without turning his head aside like he so often did when confronted with the daunting task of looking somebody in the eye. But after the things he had faced… all the hurt, all the fighting, all the bloodshed… Those things could be poured into a stare and used like tools.

These black eyes were given to me by monsters. Which I then killed, with a two-by-four filled with nails. Don’t mess with me.

The tender got the message.

Perhaps not down to the letter, but certainly the general spirit.

He smiled his easy smile at James once more before turning off to attend to something else—and James relaxed at last.

A few minutes ago, he wouldn’t have had the nerve to do that, not even with his mask and script. Even now, the thrum of his heart, trained by the town to be highstrung and fearful, was still vibrating in his chest, making him feel sick with adrenaline—or maybe that was just the bathtub brew currently stewing in his stomach. But what was that old name given to alcohol? Liquid courage? Yeah. Yeah, that’s what it was for James. He wasn’t even sure if it was physical, but the moment he could feel the burn in his throat, it only lent strength to the mean, introverted façade he’d crafted for himself years ago.

In reality, he was pretty sure that a couple gulps of the stuff, no matter how potent, wouldn’t do diddly-squat to your system. But over the years, he’d drunk to forget, to get so god-awfully smashed that he couldn’t tell which way was right-side-up anymore, much less whether or not Mary was really dying. Get drunk enough and he didn’t even need the façade because if anyone tried to talk to him, he wouldn’t even hear it. No matter how vulnerable or sad-looking he wound up once his mask was gone.

As the months had passed, it had gotten easier and easier to get there. Eventually he’d gotten to the point where it took so little to get him loopy that he was pretty sure it was psy— … psychic— … no. … See, there. It was happening already. A couple sips and he was already starting to get fuzzy around the edges.

Psychological. That was it.

But in the end, what did he care what the right word was? It made him forget things for a little while. The science of it didn’t matter.

Take that, Silent Hill. I’ll remember your lesson later, but for a few hours, you didn’t even happen.

… The mask thought those words, but James knew he didn’t mean them. They twisted his stomach like a pair of hands wringing out a wet towel. Not even alcohol could erase what had happened in that place, and he knew it. He’d learned his lesson… but what else was there for him to do now? Mary was gone. He couldn’t pretend things would get better soon anymore.

Still… she would not have wanted this.

Going on with his life as she’d wanted did not entail going straight back to what he’d been doing to himself before, and he’d known that even while he was in Silent Hill, fighting his way over broken concrete for answers. What he’d been doing for those three years could hardly be called living in the first place.

Weak. He’d always been weak. That was what he’d been punished for in that town, punished in all kinds of ways that made him want to reach for the bottle again even more.

But no. He wouldn’t be weak anymore.

That was why he was only going to take one more drink from the bottle before paying up and leaving.

One more drink.

~*~

He’d kind of forgotten how neatly the bridge of his nose tucked into the crook of his elbow when he angled it around in front of him on the countertop, but was fortunately refreshing his memory at that very moment by using it to cushion his head as he slouched, face-down. Keeping his chin pressed there against the flat wooden surface was the only way to save his now-aching eyes from the glare of the neon woman’s pink leopard-print dress, which burned straight through his eyelids unless he hid them away. His free hand was still holding the now-empty bottle.

Another, half-consumed by now, had joined it at some point.

He didn’t know how long it had been, or how many one-more-drinks he’d taken, but it didn’t matter because he’d forgotten his split-second promise to leave after the next swallow anyway. Maybe it had been hours.

Once or twice, someone had approached him, maybe to ask if he was all right, or maybe just to ask him if he had an extra quarter, but he hadn’t answered any of them, or even lifted his head long enough to find out what they wanted. They had all left him alone eventually, which was fine by him.

His hand slid down the neck of the bottle to land idly on the wood, tracing the sanded-smooth grain of the countertop blearily with one finger. It was boring, but better than letting the buzz wear away long enough for him to start thinking about who the neon woman reminded him of.

James Sunderland didn’t want to think about anything right now.

SLAM.

The sharp, heavy wham-crack of the door to the pub being opened and shut with far more force than was needed made James’s back arch like a cat, though his head remained stubbornly down, nestled in the darkness of his coat sleeve. He winced and ground his teeth, his suddenly-reawakened nerves jingling right along with the string of still-dancing bells over the door.

Somewhere down the counter to his left, he heard the tender put down a glass for someone with a clink and call out, crossly, “Hey, no minors allowed in here!”

Not even able to begin mustering up the energy to lift his head from its cushion, James listened for an answer.

“Well, soooooo-REE! I just need a phone. Don’t you got phones in here?” came the haughty reply, spoken in a very, very familiar voice. “The sign outside said you had phones in here, so you’d better or else it’s lying.”

… Suddenly able to begin mustering up the energy to lift his head from its cushion, James jerked upright and looked over his shoulder, eyes squinting against the sudden return of light to their miserable existence. … Then they widened, light be damned.

No. Ohhh, no. Oh, no no no.

What was she doing in a place like this?

Standing in the doorway with thorn-torn tights, narrowed eyes, and her little stripe-sleeved arms folded as though she was staring down intruders in her own house rather than a bar full of strangers… was Laura. There were smudges of dirt on her face and ankles, undoubtedly from tramping around in the underbrush. Her ponytail was askew and had lost most of its volume, which had gone instead to hovering in strands above and around her head in a small, static cloud.

She glared up at the tender and tapped her foot on the floor, waiting for a response. When one didn’t come, she tried again. “I said, you got any phones? Well? You got ’em or not?”

The tender scowled.

“Where are your parents, kid?” he said coldly, the conversational tone with which he’d greeted James nowhere in sight.

“None of your business,” she sniped, puffing herself up like an angry squirrel. “I just need a phone.”

Relenting with a final frown, the tender pointed grudgingly over to the dark corner with the payphones, obviously acquiescing only to get rid of her as soon as possible. “If you want a quarter, you’ll have to ask someone else for it. I don’t hand out change to spoiled little kids.” He turned back to the glass he’d been polishing, muttering darkly about tourist brats with entitlement complexes.

With a toss of her ponytail and a self-satisfied huff at ‘winning’ the argument, the girl turned on her heel and headed off in the direction of the phones, her shoes clacking on the hard floor like little hooves.

If she saw James sitting there at the counter, she didn’t show it, or even acknowledge him in the slightest. Just trotted straight past him until she was standing in front of the phones. … And stopped.

Her hesitation made it clear that she had not thought her plan out this far.

After a couple minutes of watching her bunch her fists unsurely by her sides and glare at the change slot in the phone as though hoping that if she looked angry enough, it would magically pop out enough coins to make a call with, James hesitantly reached down to check his pockets for loose change. Most of it had been lost one way or another during his ordeal (or through the hole Angela’s knife had sliced in his pants-pocket) but there were still one or two quarters in there.

Heart in throat, he moved his bad leg in preparation to get up and go to her, offer his pathetic little compensation for taking her best friend away. Fifty cents in return for the life of the closest thing to a mother she’d probably ever had. Fair trade, right?

The shame that had turned dull and sticky in his drunken funk started to smolder again.

… But then from across the room, a gravelly voice spoke up.

“Awh hell. C’mere, little Missy, I’ll give ya some change.”

… Oh. Well, that was fine too.

James sat down again, gingerly easing the weight off of his sprained ankle, and turned to face the counter once more. Probably for the best, he told himself, trying to stave off the writhing little eels of guilt twisting in his gut and pull back his mask to hide the pitiful expression he knew was creeping onto his face. He doubted she’d have accepted money from him anyway… no more than she’d have accepted a ride.

From the corner of his eye, he could see Laura turning and approaching the group of truckers from which the voice had originated, looking grateful—or, well, as grateful as someone like her would let herself look, anyway.

Good enough.

James sighed and laid his head down once more, eyes starting to drift shut against the comforting darkness of his sleeve. Until he heard something that made them snap open again.

“Hold up, here, I need a favor first. Can’t just go givin’ money away withou’ gettin’ a little somethin’ in return, the world don’t work like that. How about you give ol’ Uncle Todd here a nice big kiss?”

James’s back straightened so quickly that it sent off a miniature twenty-one-gun salute of pops and cracks down his spine and a pang of agony through his temples as his head whipped upright and around to face the payphone corner.

Laura had stopped dead in her tracks, mid-step, and the brief thankful look that had spread across her pale, pinched face had been exchanged for one of wariness. It was the same wary look that she’d stared at James with back in that town, the first time he’d approached her, although this time it was directed at someone else.

On occasion, there were people whose voices were the exact opposite of what you’d expect to be coming out of their bodies. Alcohol was one of those things that attracted people of all shapes and sizes and in his three years of barhopping, James had heard deep death-rattles coming from the scrawniest, weediest-looking individuals and voices like songbirds come out of people big enough that they could crush his head with one hand.

Such was not the case with this man. Ol’ Uncle Todd looked exactly like his voice sounded.

He was an older man, somewhere in his forties or early fifties. Oily, beetle-like eyes were set in a face that was already sweaty and red from too much beer, glinting somewhere in between the brim of a white trucker’s cap and a monster of a bristly black beard. He was big, too. The navy-blue windbreaker he wore was stretched tightly over a muscular chest and a swollen beer gut, and the sausage-like fingers that he was patting the end of his knee and beckoning mockingly to Laura with looked to be as wide around as one of her wrists.

That is to say, he was rough, enormous, and looked every bit the sort of person who’d trade money for kisses from little girls in a dirty, dimly-lit bar.

The group of men he was sitting among were obviously his friends—or perhaps just worked for the same company—because it was clear they liked him. They were all laughing like he’d just told the funniest joke in the world.

“C’mon, Todd, leave the kid alone,” said one of them, a lanky fellow with a thick skullcap that covered his eyes and a chin of stubble as uneven as a patchwork quilt. But even as he scolded, there was a sick, yellow grin of amusement on his face, which rendered the disapproving words about as effective as trying to douse a fire with gasoline and live dogs. Put a group of cruel men in one place and fill their bellies with booze and they start doing nothing but egging each other on. James had seen it happen more times than he could count.

“Hey, I ain’t doing anything wrong,” beamed Todd with a smart-alecky ‘Who, me?’ expression. It was the sort of look worn by someone who thinks he’s being terribly cute and clever but has failed to realize that once you pass a certain age, the rascal act doesn’t work anymore. “Just askin’ the pretty lady for a kiss. Nothin’ wrong with askin’ pretty ladies like you for kisses, is there, Missy?”

He puckered up a pair of wet red lips that were almost invisible behind the beard and made some kind of grotesque smacking noise that only passed for a kissing sound in his own drunken reality.

Laura didn’t budge. She had balled her fists at her sides and was standing perfectly still, like a rabbit that had just wandered unwittingly into a den of coyotes and only just realized its mistake. The angry, sizing-up glare was her usual confrontational one, but it too was a façade. Just like James’s.

“I’m not a lady, I’m a little girl,” she said haughtily, and if there had been a ‘State the Obvious’ contest going on, she’d have won with that sentence in a heartbeat. The fact that she had to even clarify that at all was a testament to how very, very wrong this entire situation was. “And even if I was, I’d never kiss an ugly old butt-sniffer like you!”

There was a collective roar as the entire group, Todd included, exploded into laughter, pounding their fists on the table and making the glasses rattle. A few of them laughed so hard that tears, their glistening easily visible in the light of the neon woman, started to pour down their ruddy, drunken cheeks.

Less visible was the angry flush that had started to creep up into Laura’s cheeks, and the way her fists had started to tremble, but James saw it anyway. Frustrated by her own inability to be more intimidating than a bunch of burly truck-drivers who liked to pick on little kids. Of course she would be.

Eventually the laughter started to die and Todd lifted a hand to wipe the water away from his beetle-black eyes, wheezing.

“You’re a FEISTY little thing, aintcha? HAW HAW HAW! Tell you what, how ’bout you just sit in my lap instead? Just like Santa, eh? C’mon, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Little girls like Santa, or else they’re bad little girls. You don’t wanna be a bad little girl, do ya, Missy?” His tone was still jovial, but somewhere deep in that mockery of a friendly voice was a threat, hidden down there like a fishing hook in a slice of bread. The keys attached to his belt jingled as he jiggled his knee in a manner that was almost obscene, garnering a bout of giddy laughter from those of his friends who were drunk enough to still be finding humor in their coworker’s antics.

James watched the entire scene unfold, his body as stiff as if it was riddled with rigor mortis. He wanted to get up or yell or wave his arms or something, but his feet were rooted to the floor; he couldn’t even budge. His mental mask had now slipped irretrievably out of his grasp, leaving the paralyzed panic bare on his face. His heart was hammering and his hands were clenched around the edges of his seat so hard that his knuckles had turned pure white, painting the nicks and cuts on them an even brighter red.

It was like watching a horror movie, the sort where you could see exactly what was coming and every inch of you ached to yell ‘Don’t open that door!’, but knew that no amount of begging would stop the hapless hero on the screen from opening the hell out of that door and being dragged inside, kicking and screaming and completely surprised. Because no matter how obvious it was to the watcher, it wasn’t to the hero.

Otherwise they wouldn’t be the hero.

“Get out of here, Laura,” he muttered miserably under his breath, which was coming as raggedly as if he’d just climbed that hiking trail to the observation deck all over again. “Turn around, walk away, just get out, get out right now…”

And Laura, bless her heart, wrinkled her nose and took a step backwards from the disgusting display.

“I’d rather die, she said venomously, and started to turn away with a toss of her ponytail, causing James’s heart to leap hopefully. Yes, yes, get out of here and don’t look back. Get away from those creeps.

But she was Laura, and Laura was too proud to walk away from a fight without getting one final dig in, so she paused after a couple of steps and looked over her shoulder at the bearded man, her face scrunched up determinedly.

“And your face looks like you got a dead Scottie-dog stapled to it!”

The lanky patchwork-chinned man sitting alongside Todd sucked in an impressed lungful of air and gave him a playful smack on the shoulder, exclaiming “HOOOOO-eeee, did’jew hear what that little sprout just said ’boutcher soup-catcher? This kid’s got BALLS, man!”

There was another uproarious bout of laughter over Laura’s spunk.

This time, Todd did not join in.

Instead he sat there, staring levelly at Laura with both hands laid flat on his knees, which had ceased their wiggling and gone still. He was still smiling, but something was different. A steely glint had entered his eyes and there was a strange, off tightness to the way he was sitting now.

There was no ripple or twitch that went over his face, or any other real indication that there was anything wrong. It had just suddenly stopped laughing and gone very, very still.

Sometimes people did crazy things when they were drunk. There was always some dumb college kid who woke up naked in someone’s living room with ‘DICKS’ written across their forehead in Sharpie, or some poor sucker who got cocky enough to hit on that hourglass-figured woman in the tiny dress, only to find out that she was happily married to someone named Biff, who had biceps the size of small dogs and also happened to be standing right behind them.

That was normal. That was just people for you. James had seen or heard of all of that and more.

But sometimes, you’d get the individual who had something else wrong with them. Something deep inside, that was there before even a single drop of amber passed their lips. They’d look perfectly normal, because whatever was wrong with them, it was the sort of break that you could patch up with metaphorical glue and hide from the world as long as you had the presence of mind to do so. Then the alcohol melted that glue away and split the break wide open and let all those bad things that were locked away come boiling out like pus from an abscess.

And out of nowhere that same calm, smiley person who you were just talking to about the Red Sox-Yankees game could suddenly be pressing your head into the bar with their elbow in your throat, eyes alight with hysterical rage, all because you’d done something as small as accidentally scoot your drink a little too far in their direction.

And right now, somewhere behind those horrifyingly blank eyes and that placid smile, something about Laura’s harmless, childish insult—one that would have gotten nothing more than a groan and rolled eyes from any normal adult—had made those last strands of glue stretch out and break, like the little filament in a light bulb fraying and making that final ping! sound before it snapped and burned the bulb out.

There was something very, very wrong with Uncle Todd.

And he’d seen it coming from a mile away.

James groaned in horror.

“Y’know, there’s nothin’ wrong with being a pretty lady,” Todd said quietly, almost thoughtfully. In some strange way, his voice had grown a little smoother than the rowdy, drunken growl he had spoken in before, and as the words floated up out of the mouth that lurked behind that tangle of hair, something about the room grew colder. “That’s what little girls like you grow up to be, y’know. They grow up and get curvy and then they don’t do nothin’ but hang around places like this, givin’ kisses to all us old butt-sniffers, ’cause once they all grown up, we’re the only ones that care.”

An uncomfortable silence had descended on the group around him and James knew that they had all sensed it too, that weird light that had turned on behind their colleague’s eyes like the tiny, silvery start of a fire, flickering silently in the corner of a room.

“… Todd, enough’s enough,” mumbled Patchwork lowly after a time, in a tone much more urgent than his first scolding and without any of the exaggerated rural slang. He wasn’t grinning anymore.

“Shut the hell up,” said Todd, still smiling. His eyes had not left Laura—or blinked once, for that matter—and he leaned in slightly, the windbreaker rustling as his gut pressed against his knees. “They don’t do nothin’ else, those pretty ladies, ’cause they ain’t good for nothin’ else. You gonna grow some titties soon, little girl, and then you’ll understand what I mean. You know what titties are?”

He raised his hands and clenched them in front of his chest in crude demonstration, blank smile unchanging. Nothing about his expression ha changed, as though it were a photograph cut from a magazine or movie still. He was wearing his own face like a mask.

“I kin show you, if you’d just come over here to Uncle Todd. He could give you a head-start, ’cause that’s what’s gonna happen to you. You gonna grow up and spend the rest of your life in bars like this’un, makin’ these long business trips for butt-sniffers like us less lonely.”

Laura had frozen again, caught in the trucker’s unblinking stare like a doe in the headlights of the vehicle he drove for a living, and James could tell that she, too, was rooted to the spot. Her defiance was all but gone. She saw the glint.

Still, because she was better at maintaining the façade than James was, she bunched her fists once more and barked out a shrill, “You’re a LIAR! Bug off!”

Between the high register and the staticky frizzing of her hair, her protests gave the overall effect of a Pomeranian yipping frantically like an unwanted intruder. Ineffective and almost pathetically funny, if it weren’t for the seriousness of the situation.

Undeterred, Todd just leaned in further, his eyes gleaming. There was a hoarse, longing quality to his voice now. The words that he was speaking had a sort of sickening life to them, crawling out of his lips like so many dark lizards and insects that were pouring out of the crack in his head.

“They got a word for that, y’know. They got all kinds of words for what little girls like you grow up to be.”

The tender. Why the hell isn’t the tender doing anything?

James looked over his shoulder frantically and spotted the tender walking his way with dishcloth in hand, face blank as he determinedly ignored the goings-on in the corner of the room.

With speed and force that surprised even him, James reached out and grabbed the tender’s wrist as he pssed.

“Stop this!” he hissed desperately when the other man turned to face him, anger and a certain disgust creeping into his professionally-neutral expression. In an instant, James realized that his surly mask gone, leaving the wide-eyed fear that he had worked so hard to hide from the tender in the first place as plain on his face as the bruises. It sent a wave of self-loathing through him, but there were more important things at stake right now than what a stranger thought of him. “Make them stop, right now!”

“She can leave any time she wants,” said the tender coldly, reaching out with manicured fingers and trying to peel James’s bruised hands off of his arm. All the false warmth from his initial greeting was gone and for just a moment, James had to wonder if there wasn’t something wrong with him, too. Would a normal person just let something like this happen? “She hasn’t had a finger laid on her. A little scare’ll teach the brat not to come into places like this anymore. Touch me again and I’ll have you thrown out on your ass.”

He pulled away, causing James’s stool to slide forward until the edge of the countertop was digging uncomfortably into his middle, forcing him to let go.

“And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t interfere over there, either.” With one last cold glare, the tender continued on his way, back turned to the entire scene. He disappeared through a door and into some back room. James watched him go speechlessly, utterly stunned. Did he not hear the sickening words floating out of that dark corner? Had he seriously failed to notice that diseased light in the bearded man’s eyes?

Then it occurred to James that the tender probably had seen it.

He just didn’t care.

No one in the room seemed to care.

Not enough to do something.

And that left James, teetering on the raggedy edge between forcing himself out of his shock, or sitting there and watching something awful happen.

And all the while, the horror show in the corner continued to unfold, unsympathetic to the hesitations of those on the outside.

The neon woman’s pink dress started to flicker and buzz again.

“I know every one’a those words, little girl. I know what you are.”

No one was saying anything now. No one except for Todd, whose voice had gone even quieter, though James could still hear every word through the silence. But he still couldn’t move. Even though he wanted to, so badly. All he could do was watch, with a strange feeling like his lungs were burning up. Like he’d been underwater too long without air.

I should help. Why can’t I? I should, I should, please just STOP, just leave her alone!

There was no love lost between him and Laura. She hated him, and he didn’t even know her. Not really.

But she had been Mary’s friend… Mary’s only friend, in the end. Because James sure hadn’t been there. Laura had been a better companion to Mary in her final days than her own husband had been. Bratty or not, Mary must have seen something good there, because she loved that little girl so. And here she was, being talked to in this ugly, ugly way by a man who was crazy, even crazier than James. Listening to it was almost as bad as listening to someone talk that way to Mary would have been. … No, it was worse. Because if it had been Mary, he wouldn’t have hesitated to stand up and put a stop to it. Wouldn’t have been so afraid.

But here, now, he couldn’t do a thing. Because he was James Sunderland and James Sunderland couldn’t do anything but watch people waste away from disease, get stabbed straight through, bleed out across the floor right in front of his eyes, walk up the burning staircase and into the inferno, run away through the mist—

“Know ’em all, from A to fuckin’ Z. Every one a’them pretty little words. I could tell y—hey HEY I’M TALKIN’ AT YOU!”

And there it went.

Just like the first snap, there was no transition, no prior warning, no signal that indicated that something was about to happen. It just did.

Laura’s feet had finally remembered how to move, and she had started to turn, possibly to run for the door like James had been silently praying for her to do so desperately the entire time. And this, like the ill-timed beard comment, changed everything.

In the middle of his sentence, Todd’s voice had turned into a roar as abruptly and jarringly as someone un-muting a television.

The stool he had been sitting on clattered to the floor as he lurched to his feet so swiftly that James could almost hear the whoosh of air as it rushed into the space that his hulking body had previously been occupying.

And his placid rubber mask of a face crumpled, contorted like a beer can being crushed in someone’s fist, stretched and broke and cracked around the edges, the flesh twisting into a thousand rage-induced wrinkles and crevices as his eyes squinted, almost like he was going to burst into tears.

The beard finally parted enough to show a black pit of a mouth yawning downwards into an elongated upside-down ‘D’ shape that wobbled and distorted in the dim, flickering light as he clenched ham-sized fists and howled.

“YOU LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKIN’ AT YOU, YOU LITTLE SLUT!”

There was a rapid clunking of stool legs and shuffling of feet as the other members of the group scrambled out of the way, finally realizing what James had sensed to begin with and abandoning ship lest one of those fists decided it wanted to find its way around a nearby throat.

Laura spun halfway around in alarm, only to let out a squeal of alarm as a fist closed instead around her scrawny arm. It didn’t stay there for long, because her immediate and perfectly-justified reaction was to rake her nails across it with such force that there was no way she hadn’t drawn blood. The arm recoiled by pure reflex, but Todd didn’t.

“PRETTY LADIES!” he bellowed, staring straight ahead, and it was obvious he didn’t see Laura anymore. He was seeing something else entirely, something that probably only existed in his alcohol-soaked brain. “I LIKE ’EM!”

Two bodies wrapped in a sack of brown skin, stretched like a canvas across something like a walking bedframe, grinding together while a gaping mouth moaned and gargled…

James’s teeth clenched so hard that they hurt and he clutched the edge of the boat countertop. Run, Laura… please…

“They make it STOP!” Todd barked out, moving towards Laura again. His words now made sense only sporadically, like someone banging randomly on the keys of a piano.

It grunted and slavered as it staggered forward on its bedpost legs, towards the girl by the television in the room of pistons…

He was bawling now, mouth wide open like a squalling baby.

“Pretty ladies are supposed to make it feel better! WHY WON’T YOU MAKE ME FEEL BETTER?”

Why was nobody else doing anything?

“NO!” Laura screamed, stumbling backwards before finally, too late, trying to run.

I should do something, but I can’t. What’s stopping me? I just can’t, like I couldn’t help Mary Angela Maria…

James’s eyes were shut and his shoulders were shaking.

Mary was in his arms and the boat’s edge was digging into him again, leaving a perfect bar of a bruise in the middle of his stomach as he let the water slip up to his shoulders, feeling the ominous wobble as the boat’s balance teetered.

Mary’s eyes were open and she was staring straight at him.

“James!” she cried, frantically.

There was a crash and a tinkle of glass. Todd had snatched up a half-drunk bottle of wine and hurled it at the little girl, who had shrieked and ducked, falling to her knees in the process, causing it to miss her head by inches and shatter on the edge of a table, showering her with sharp fragments.

The sound, as though jerking him out of some kind of dream, made Todd blink and look down at the cowering child, falling silent for a moment.

Then he reached for her. The gleam in his eyes was so strong it was as though a glossy pair of headlights had been hooked up behind them, making them shine glassily through the river of tears flowing out of them.

He no longer wanted a kiss.

He wanted to feel a neck, frail and brittle like a little bird’s, snapping between his fists. Because that would be just as good as a kiss, in its own way. There was more than one reason that the euphemism ‘choking the chicken’ existed, at least for Todd.

Mary screamed. The voice that came out of her mouth was Laura’s, because Laura was screaming. Laura was screaming bloody murder.

James bit his tongue until he tasted blood, himself.

No. I won’t let this happen.

The boat tipped over.

~*~

The only warning that Todd had was the shuffle-thud of uneven running steps.

And if James hadn’t had a bad leg, there wouldn’t have been any warning at all.

The bearded man had only just started to turn his head away from the little girl (who was now in tears, too terrified to even holler one of her famous comebacks, most of which involved a rude word describing some bodily function or other, followed by ‘-face’) he was reaching for, the sound somehow registering through the crack I his mind long enough to catch his attention.

A split second later and he wouldn’t have seen James coming at all.

There was a horrendous smashing of broken glass and snapping wood as James ploughed straight into Todd, knocking him away from Laura and directly into a nearby table, which actually snapped under the big man’s weight.

Part of it was pure, dumb luck. James was much smaller than Todd, and despite having a little extra padding from a life without much exercise, a hell of a lot lighter. It wasn’t even that he was a small man—it was just that Todd was so huge. But the trucker had been leaning forward, so focused on the helpless child before him that he hadn’t been prepared for the sudden, unexpected addition of a furious man in an army coat to the scenario..

He keeled downwards with an explosive splintering of wood, letting out a surprised grunt. Carried by his own momentum and knocked off-balance by a table leg slamming against his bad ankle, James went with him and they both plunged to the floor in a tangle of flesh, fists, and broken green glass.

In the split-second between the start and end of the fall, James caught a brief glimpse of Laura’s face somewhere behind all the legs that had surrounded the zone of conflict. It was pale and tear-streaked, but she was staring right at him, her terror having fled and been replaced by pure, unmitigated shock. He couldn’t hear her over the commotion of things breaking and people scrambling to get out of the way, but her lips visibly formed a single word: ‘…James?’

And then she was lost to view as they hit the floor with an earth-shaking crash.

The unfortunate fellow who had been sitting at the now-trashed table woke from his drunken stupor instantly and scrambled backwards away from the mess with a partly-outraged but mostly-startled “JESUS CHRIST!”

But it was drowned out by the howl of surprise and rage that came from Todd, which was so powerful that James could feel it vibrate through his entire body.

“AAAARGH! YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

The beetle-black eyes that were glaring into James’s, only inches away from his face—so close that he could smell the stench of daily alcohol abuse on Todd’s breath and feel its sour heat as it pluffed against his tender throat in hot clouds—were no longer lit up with that sick light. As was often the case, that inner crack sometimes knew when to conveniently mend itself back up again. Until the next time it broke open, of course.

But now the eyes were alight with a different kind of crazy, one that was much more commonplace.

Plain, old-fashioned drunken rage.

The entire left side of James’s face exploded into bright, colorful bursts of pain as a fist that seemed to be the size and solidity of a small boulder came smashing upwards and his whole body popped backwards in a fashion that was almost cartoonish. A near-perfect arc, like those old animated shorts he’d watched as a little boy where Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote were getting nailed in the face with spring-loaded punching gloves left and right.

However, there was a very significant difference between those cartoons and real life, and the difference was that in real life, it hurt. It hurt a lot.

The punch had such force that James thought for one petrified instant that he might do a full flip—but then his back met the floor with an unforgiving THUNK.

He barely had time to clap a hand to the smarting flesh on the side of his face, which he could already feel starting to get puffy, before he heard glass crunching under boot as Todd climbed to his feet, looking more like some kind of hulking mountain rising than a human being.

A terrible, rumbling growl that would be more befitting of a wild animal came erupting out of his throat and whatever part of James’s panicked brain was spitting out all these nonsensical comparisons quickly replaced ‘mountain’ with ‘volcano’. Mouth twisted into a snarl, Todd clenched his knuckles with an audible crack and reached down with alarming swiftness to wrap those sausage-like fingers into James’s shirt-collar, gathering a ham-sized fistful of fabric and sending the cuts scattered across the younger man’s stomach alight with pain once more as they were exposed to the cool air.

“You just made the biggest mistake of yer miserable life, boy,” he spat. “I’m gonna beatchu so hard, you’ll be turned away from the pearly gates ’cause there won’t be anythin’ left of yer face for Saint Peter to recognize!”

As his torso was jerked upwards off of the floor, two main trains of thought were running frenetically through James’s mind.

One was: … No. No, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what the biggest mistake of my miserable life was, and it wasn’t stopping some perverted old man from hurting a little girl.

The other was not in words so much as a series of spontaneous realizations as he noticed the shards of bottle-green glass poking out of the fabric of Todd’s pant-leg, courtesy of the heavy fall they’d both taken onto the debris of table and bottle alike.

Gritting his teeth, James bunched the muscles in his good leg and brought the sole of his boot slamming down against the trucker’s shin.

He had always been a terrible kicker, from as early as the days of being picked last for soccer in every Phys. Ed class, to as recently as just hours earlier, meekly crushing the life out of the Otherworld’s twisted children under his feet. But it didn’t take much force to drive a bunch of jagged, razor-sharp fragments of glass through denim and into flesh.

Todd screamed and James’s back abruptly met the floor again as he was unceremoniously dropped.

“AAUGH! You little BASTARD!” Todd howled, his voice tight with agony as he staggered backwards. Any further words on his part just sort of trailed off into a long stream of obscenities as he lashed out a flailing hand for James once more.

But this time something was a little different, and in a strange way, James wasn’t entirely certain that something in his own head hadn’t cracked open a little bit too, because the light from the neon woman’s dress didn’t really look pink anymore.

No… now it was starting to look a little red.

He was not a strong person. That much he was sure of. A strong person would have stepped in far, far sooner than he had—not been rooted to their seat like a worried spectator on the sidelines of a schoolyard brawl, afraid that a playground monitor might come out at any second and think he was involved.

But in the past twenty-four hours, he had fought tooth and nail, bullet and blade, to survive. Him, James Sunderland.

He’d been mauled, strangled, shot, bludgeoned, thrown, dragged, held underwater, and run so long and hard that his lungs seemed ready to burst and his feet felt worn to the bone.

It didn’t matter that he had been terrified to the point of tears at times, or that he’d done just as much fleeing as he had fighting. He had taken on monsters and lived, as much as one could say that someone like him could live after everything that had happened. Genuine, honest-to-goodness monsters, the kind that crept in the shadowy corners and underbeds of the deepest, darkest, most Freudian parts of the imagination.

Well… ol’ Uncle Todd might not have had twisted straightjackets of flesh encasing his body, or been suspended from frames of rusted metal, or served as the platform for fornicating bodies that writhed in sync with each other under the skin on his back… but if there was one thing James was sure of, as the memory of the sicklights deep in the back of that trucker’s skull floated in front of his mind’s eye, it was that Todd was just as much of a monster as anything he had seen in Silent Hill.

And James knew he could fight monsters.

Scooting hastily away from the grasping arms, James snatched up the broken table-leg that he’d tripped on and struck out with it with such ferocity that the sound it made when it rapped across one of those beefy hands rebounded like a whipcrack.

There were yells coming from the crowd around him, but James didn’t care. He could hardly hear them. They were blocked out by Todd’s roars of pain and anger, along with a sort of ringing in his own ears. All the pain leaking into his consciousness from the wounds all over his body were gone, blotted out by the force of the adrenaline rushing through his veins.

It was, perhaps, a sad sort of testament to the effect the last few days’d had on James that this state of mind had become the norm. It had grown almost as familiar and oddly comforting as the buzzing glow of liquid courage.

His protective mask had long since abandoned him.

Right now, there was only himself and a monster.

And if he didn’t keep that monster at bay, he would wind up dead. And so would Laura.

James ducked under another locomotive-like punch, feeling the wind from it ruffle his hair as it swept millimeters over his head. He wasn’t so lucky for the next swing that came his way and his already-sore nose was the victim this time.

Rocking backwards, the edge of a table against his back was all that kept him from falling. He grasped it with one hand determinedly to shove off from it again, and was vaguely aware of an uproar from the onlookers. It wasn’t until he felt a warm gush of liquid flowing down over his chin and tasted copper trickling into the corners of his open mouth that he realized his nose was spurting blood.

Well, great. If it wasn’t broken before, it almost certainly was now.

But aside from the dull ache, the pain failed to register and James launched forwards once more, swinging the leg back and forth, up and down, heaving it through the air in front of him like an utter maniac as thick drops of his own blood splattered the floor. Todd’s fists continued to fly, but they couldn’t hit him anymore. They couldn’t even get lose, not without encountering his impromptu weapon.

Frustrated by his sudden lack of ability to hit his smaller, less-muscular, and already freely-bleeding opponent, Todd opened his mouth to howl something else; possibly another volley of abrasive language. But as far as James was concerned, the monster had said more than enough already.

So for the first time since he’d been sitting there muttering desperate pleas to himself as he watched ol’ Uncle Todd harass the little girl who might one day have been his daughter if Mary’s cough had gone away, James spoke up.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHH!”

It wasn’t much of a battle-cry. It was just a noise, one that had been boiling up in James’s chest for hours; long before he had entered the bar, or walked up to the observation deck, or watched the videotape in Room 312, or even come to Silent Hill at all.

James didn’t yell a whole lot, never had. He’d always had the tendency to quietly brood when his temper ran high or his spirits low, something that had helped facilitate his transformation over the months of Mary’s illness from the pitiable, heartbroken fool to the sullen, surly jerk that Laura had watched from afar whenever he’d come to visit Mary in the hospital.

So in reality, the noise that was escaping him right now was one he’d been holding back for a very long time.

It sounded stupid. But it felt good.

So he kept doing it.

“AAAAAAAAAGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”

Swinging the leg like a whirlwind, James went after Todd, not caring whether he hit him or not so much as just pushed him back, and he yelled the entire time. Intimidating or not, when a sound was being uttered over and over by a man who’d just survived the closest thing to Hell that could exist on God’s green earth, a man with wild eyes, a blood-streaked chin, and a weapon…

It was a goddamn battle-cry.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUGHHHH!”

Eventually the expression on Todd’s face went from violent, to frustrated, to uncertain, and then at last to genuinely worried.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” he roared over James’s screams eventually, trying to put a table between himself and the crazy man in the green coat. “I didn’t do a goddamn thing to you!”

James’s reply was to bring the table-leg down with an enthusiastic crack against one of Todd’s kneecaps, causing the man to bugle with pain and stumble. He could tell by an odd fluttering sensation down by his side that his bandages had come loose from all the motion, but he didn’t care.

His war-cry finally ceased to be a long string of A’s and formed into grating words that tapered off into howls at their ends, each one punctuated by a swing of the table-leg and a small, splattery spray of red as he spat them out.

“LEEEAVE—!” Swish! “HER—” CRACK! “ALOOOOOOOONE!”

It took a moment for, seemingly, the words to register in the trucker’s broken brain. But when they did, his eyes started to widen. Which made James feel even better than the yelling did.

“I WASN’T GONNA TOUCH HER!” he hollered, and James was pleased to hear that there was a definite note of fear in his voice. He leaned back to avoid a particularly vehement swing of the leg. His cap had been knocked sideways, taking that ominous shadow off of his eyes. Their whites were visible. Somehow, that made him less frightening. “I WAS JUST TRYIN’ TO SCARE HER, YOU FUCKING PSYCHO!”

Hearing that one made James almost want to laugh, to cackle like the psycho he’d just been called and say, ‘Buddy, I may be crazy, but anyone here can see that you’re the psycho!’ But he didn’t. Instead he just screamed, again, “LEAVE HER ALONE!”

But his arms were starting to tire, their swinging starting to slow. No amount of adrenaline, pent-up battle cries, or liquid courage could change the fact that his body was hurting and exhausted.

His decision to turn to his old numbing standby instead of giving his body what it really needed (a little something called sleep) was costing him.

For all his drinking during those hard years, James had never been in a barfight before. He’d seen a few, of course, but he’d always been safely on the sidelines and there were perhaps as few as two occasions where he’d even known any of the people involved. Whereas on the other hand, it was probably safe to say that Todd (or indeed, anyone in Todd’s posse, who were gathered all around now) had been in more than a few.

Scared or not, crazy or not, Todd knew what he was doing better than James did and as the table leg made another vicious pass, scant centimeters away from his face, he took advantage of the small window of opportunity while the momentum forced James to carry out the swing.

All the breath in James’s lungs left him in a whoosh and a spray of red droplets that splattered onto Todd’s white cap as one of the trucker’s boulder-like fists dipped low and slammed upwards into the younger man’s already-bruised stomach. The table leg hit the floor with a clatter as James staggered backwards, his bad ankle buckling underneath him and nearly causing him to join his fallen weapon on the floor.

He’d had the wind knocked out of him more than once during his journey to Silent Hill and he knew that in a few moments, he’d be fine again—or as fine as someone who’d just been socked in the gut and had what felt like Niagara Falls coming out of his nose could possibly be—but this wasn’t exactly the kind of situation where he had moments to spare for breath-catching.

And on top of that, the human body had a tendency to freak out when it couldn’t breathe. Like, a lot.

He choked and spluttered, mouthing like a fish out of water as he tried to pull air into lungs that just weren’t ready to get back on their feet yet. Through the oxygen-deprived haze that was covering his vision, he saw Todd’s expression return to a confident, determined desire to deliver a world of pain unto his raggedy, coat-clad opponent. The fists clenched again.

One more hit from those would end the fight, and James couldn’t afford to let that happen. Todd’s mask had come back, the invisible glue sealing that crack back up and hiding the sicklights, but they were still there. Waiting.

And James couldn’t see—couldn’t take the time to look and see—if Laura had gotten safely out of this place yet.

So the one little part of his brain that was smarter than the rest of it was, the part that only seemed to awaken when he was in immediate danger or dying, spontaneously came back to life and drifted in over the panicked alarm bells in his head like the calm voice of the pilot’s intercom over the clamor of a falling plane full of hysterical passengers.

James. You don’t need to breathe to spit.

This was true.

So as Todd came swooping in for the kill, James immediately tried to recall the last time he had hocked a loogie and how exactly he had done so. The result wasn’t a loogie so much as a pitiful spray of blood-tinted, slightly alcoholic saliva. But it hit Todd in the eye and distracted him and was therefore good enough for James.

Caught off-guard, Todd clawed at his eye instantly, as though worried James might have just spat acid at him. The survival-oriented part of James’s brain took this moment to helpfully add, You don’t need to breathe to kick, either.

So as his chest was trying to heave and not fully grasping why it couldn’t, James once again kicked at the spot on Todd’s leg where he knew the broken glass was embedded, gaining an agonized scream for his efforts.

Howling, Todd threw one punch, too late, in James’s direction. It missed by a mile. Or maybe several feet. Whatever, James was too busy to think about whether or not his hyperbole was accurate. The trucker’s glass-filled leg buckled and he started to pitch backwards. James decided to help him out.

Throwing himself forward, James pushed every ounce of weight into his lunge and slammed into the off-balance Todd with his good shoulder. It worked.

This time, there was no table to block or slow Todd’s fall and the immense, glass-rattling crash that resulted from the pure, uninterrupted impact of his lumberjacklike body hitting the floor was almost magnificent. James landed on top of him, one knee digging into the bearded man’s gut with a somehow-comical swish from the denim scraping against the windbreaker. The dull roar that James’s ears registered from the crowd around them cast the surreal illusion that this was some kind of spectator sport in the stadium.

Dirty Old Pedophile versus Domestic Murderer, who will win? Next up on ESPN! was giddily chimed in his head by some voice he wasn’t entirely sure was even his. The intelligent, survival-oriented portion of his brain had apparently shut off again. Gee, thanks.

It wasn’t so much a split second that the two looked up and down at each other. Somehow, the descriptor ‘a split second’ seemed too long to appropriately do justice to that freeze-frame of an instant during which their eyes met.

Todd’s were wide enough that James could see himself in them, and scared enough that he could almost see the trucker’s very thoughts printed in neat, readable letters over the glued-up line behind which the sicklights waited. He was wondering what the hell had just happened, where this pitiful-looking stranger had come from and why he, Todd, was not winning the fight anymore. And he was frightened.

To be fair, up close, James probably looked pretty unsettling. What with the gushing blood and all.

This time it was James’s fists that alternately snatched hold of his opponent’s coat collar and drew back in preparation to come slamming downwards. Conveniently, his lungs picked that moment to start re-inflating. The process was so painful that it registered even through the reddish-feeling, numbing haze that had settled over his wounds the moment he’d launched himself into the fight, but he didn’t care.

Drawing himself up, he filled his aching chest with air and then leaned down to bark straight into Todd’s face, in a voice that was far too high-pitched and croaky to get across the true extent of the anger behind his nonetheless heartfelt words, “Leave her ALONE, you mangy old BASTARD!”

And then he punched Todd in the face. It felt great.

So he kept doing it.

His punches had nowhere near the amount of force behind them as Todd’s did, but just as that scream had been building up for hours days months years, there was a boiling, bubbling rage somewhere between his battered lungs, and he had a feeling it wouldn’t go away until his bruised knuckles met the flabby, bristly face of the man who had tried to hurt Laura—Mary’s Laura— as many times as they could.

Each occasion upon which this momentous event occurred was accompanied by a word that was harshly grated out through James’s gritted teeth.

“Don’t—you—ever—touch—her—again!!”

It was hard to tell just how long this continued. James, more than most people, knew how time could pass as slow as molasses or as quickly as a fast-forwarded tape depending on what was happening. He might have been there, pinning Todd down with his knees and slamming his clenched fist down again and again for five minutes, or it could have been five seconds. It was really, honestly hard to say.

But the spell ended when a shrill, high-pitched noise cut through the rumbling in his ears. It was Laura’s voice, and she was screaming again.

It was not a scream of fear this time, so James’s initial reaction was a sort of exasperated mental groan at the fact that she was even still here at all—that she hadn’t left as soon as he’d distracted her attacker. She had seemed so fond of gleefully turning tail and leaving him choking on her dust whenever he needed her before, so why the heck did that have to change now?

But the tone was urgent, and by the time the words actually registered in his head, it was a little too late.

“James, LOOK OUT!”

Huh? Since when would Laura be telling him to look out for… well, anything? Since when did she care? No, that couldn’t actually be what she’d said, he was just hearing thi—

Something smashed against the back of his head and suddenly the roaring was gone, Laura’s voice was gone, and the meaty sound of his fists pounding into the face in front of him was gone. All he could hear was the sound of ringing sirens, so loudly that he couldn’t tell whether they were real or just in his own head.

He didn’t quite remember falling—it was more like one moment he was doing the punching, and the next he was sprawled flat across Todd’s chest, his face pressed unpleasantly into some sweaty crease between throat and jawline, with wiry, unwashed beard hair prickling against his neck and the stench of beer and cigarette-butt sweat invading his nostrils, even overpowering the reek of his own blood.

It was a blessing that he was only there a couple of seconds before Todd’s shovel-like hands shoved him ungently onto the floor, where he lolled onto his back, too dizzy to protest with anything more than a feeble flapping of limbs.

The lights above swam and shimmered before his eyes. As a ring of faces leaned above him in a circle, it was hard to tell just how many were there in reality because there were multiples floating around beside their twins, like they were all trapped in the corner of a House of Mirrors.

But the one face he could see clearly, even as his vision rapidly faded into darkness, was that of the bartender. His eyes were cold as they stared down at the bruised and bloodied man on the floor, and his mouth was pressed into a grim, pale line. In one of his hands was the broken stub of a wine bottle.

Every line and fraction of his expression said, clearly and unsympathetically: I told you not to interfere, you sorry son of a bitch.

~*~

The man in the green coat’s surprised and slightly-dazed eyes focused on him only briefly before they rolled up to show their whites, like a submissive dog going belly-up, and slid shut. Predictable. He’d been in terrible shape from the moment he walked into this place—limping in looking like he’d just crawled out of a battlefield trench. It was honestly kind of surprising that the guy had lasted that long against a powerhouse like Todd to begin with, much less actually gotten the upper hand.

It was clear that this forlorn and raggedy stranger, pathetic as he so clearly was (even behind that surly glare he’d held up in front of his face like a masquerade mask), had something that Todd did not.

And now, looking down at the unconscious contender, suddenly his curiosity was reignited, with questions brimming up in his brain like champagne bubbles.

There were so many questions he’d have liked to ask of this man.

… But ah, well. Shame they wouldn’t be heard.

He placed the broken bottle delicately down on the table (miraculously still standing) behind him and let out a long sigh, reaching up to mop his hairless brow.

Victor was not a man without morals. He knew the Holy Word and went to church every Sunday and had even almost become Father, once. He’d been beaten to the punch by that smug little ass-kisser of a whelp, of course—which seemed to him to be what happened to most good, hard-working men. But that was past history and God said to forgive, so of course he humbly accepted the injustice and turned the other cheek. … Not, of course, that his teeth didn’t grind viciously behind that cheek every time he went to service and had to watch that brat preach from the pulpit like he owned it. But he was certain that a little bit of resentment was excusable, considering the circumstances.

So he had opened a bar instead, and in a way, that was almost like being a Father anyway. He had his own little flock of lost sheep and he took care of them, yes he did. Lost souls in need of nothing more than a little guidance, something that was so hard to find nowadays. Oh, the fake sort was around in abundance, but so many of those guides were nothing more than spiritual snake-oil salesmen… but of course that wasn’t the case within these walls. They needed Victor’s special little brands of medicine, and they always came back for more of it. Always.

Vick, they called him. Father Vick.

It sounded pretty good. Had a nice ring to it, a certain rightness to the way the syllables clicked together. Official-sounding enough to carry an appropriate weight, but informal enough to feel friendly and establish that oh-so-important, old-fashioned air of trustworthiness, like a close family friend. The title certainly suited his name better than it did Vincent. But damned if the rest of them had the brains to see that. Pffft.

All the same, he did good work here. Everyone in the church said so. Some disapproved, of course, on account of the way he encouraged indulgence in the pleasures of inebriation, but even the naysayers had to admit that he was good at picking out the ones who needed some leading—or even better, the ones who, with a bit of spit and elbow grease, could drag themselves up out of the quagmire and become real, prominent members of the church. He’d brought many people into the fold this way, extended their reach far beyond the limits of their tiny town. More than those other fools who thought that standing around in public places to preach their way into not-easily-lost reputations of fanaticism was the way to go, anyway.

This man, the one lying crumpled on the floor like a scarecrow that had been blown down in a storm, he’d had a look about him. Indefinable. Different than most who walked in through these doors, although he was lost too, very lost-looking indeed, despite his almost-endearing efforts to hide it. And those bandages, the dried brown patches on his coat!

Vick was a bartender. He loved a good story and he knew a good story when he saw one. And telling a story to a willing listener, well, that established a certain bond, didn’t it? A sort of trust. So many poor souls out there had no one to listen to them, no one to put their trust in. And that was where good old Father Vick came in.

Which was why he’d tried to snag the attention of this mysterious young man right off the bat. He looked like he needed an ear, the poor sullen-looking thing—needed a little of that magic medicine.

Nothing doing, though. He’d proven as surly as a chained dog and as unresponsive as a chunk of firewood. Pity. Those types were never any fun.

But look where it got him. Sprawled out on the floor, bandages unraveling and shirt all marred up with fresh blood, doubly-bruised eyes shut and brows furrowed fretfully, even in stone-cold unconsciousness. Out like a light. And Vick hadn’t even hit him that hard. He must have been on the verge of collapse before the bottle had even broken over his head. Perhaps if he’d been a little more willing to spread himself open like a book when prompted like a good little lost soul, Vick might have felt sorry for him.

A small crowd had gathered in around the unconscious body, a little warily. They had all see him go crazy, crazy enough that ol’ Todd, who was as crazy as they came (though Vick never used that word out loud, it was an ugly word and using ugly words was not a good way to entice people to follow) had wound up on his back, being fed multiple, bloody helpings of knuckle sandwich.

“Who is he, Vick?” asked one of his sheep, a member of that semi-migratory group of truckers who always stopped by on their way through every few months. He was reaching out tentatively to prod the limp body with a heavily-booted foot.

“No idea. An outsider,” Vick said smoothly, though his eyes narrowed a little as he said it. The old ‘o’ word. Interesting or not, they always did tend to cause complications. He’d gotten that sour, prickly vibe of a potential problem the very moment this odd stranger didn’t bite at his usual poison-medicine line, which was normally such a hit. Goddamn outies. If they wouldn’t take their medicine, to hell with them, in Vick’s opinion. “Fucker was probably drunk before he ever walked in these doors. See the bandages? He’s been fighting.”

He pointed to the red-splotched strips of cloth trailing away from the unconscious man’s brow before straightening up again and putting his hands on his hips.

“Probably a masochist, came in here looking for his next high. Well, I could tell the moment he walked in that he’d be trouble. Always can.”

Someone clapped him on the back of the shoulder and said, “That’s ’cause you’re smart, Vick!”

To this, Vick replied by smirking and tapping his temple with a knowing brow-waggle, which got a hearty laugh. It always did. They trusted him, as they should have, of course. But now it was time for business. He cracked his knuckles and got down on his knees, reaching for the pockets of the dirty army-coat.

“Time to see who our turbulent guest is, eh?”

It took awhile to find any sort of identification. The man’s pockets were crammed to bursting with all kinds of ridiculous odds and ends—the sorts of things that seemed to Vick were the types that spontaneously sprung into existence in the backs of kitchen drawers and existed solely to confound the one who discovered them and knew that they hadn’t been there the last time they looked.

A burnt-out flashlight bulb, a tangled mess of hair with a bent needle poking out of it, a blank sheet of paper, a broken portable radio, a wire-cutter, an empty can of paint-thinner, a boring photograph of some plainly-dressed woman, empty bullet casings…

But finally, a wallet. A wallet with a driver’s license inside. Bingo.

Vick pulled it out and flicked it over, regarding the photograph and the name. They matched, all right, although the photo did not share its real-life counterpart’s bruises. Still, there was that same tired, hangdog expression, the one he’d seen on the fellow’s face right when he’d first come through the door. Before it had been replaced with a growly look that was as fake as the smile Vick had offered in return.

Judging by the date on the license, it must not have been taken that long ago. A year, maybe two.

“… ‘James Sunderland’. … Huh. Must really be an outsider. I don’t even think he’s local. Don’t recognize the name… hah. Look at that ugly mug. Looks like he just watched someone run over his dog, then back the car up and run over it again, don’t he?”

He made a joke of it mainly to calm his sheep. That had been an upsetting experience, after all. They’d only been having some fun and relaxation in their safe space, and here came a crazy outsider to ruin it all. He was allowed to refer to the ones outside the church as ‘crazy’, of course. Didn’t have to worry about teaching the ones who didn’t want to be taught, so his language could get as ugly as it damn well wanted to.

After getting another scattered laugh from the surrounding crowd, he shrugged and tucked the ID away. He had no reason to keep it, or anything else he’d found in there. Worthless junk, the lot of it. Just like its owner. So he crammed it haphazardly back into the unconscious man’s pockets, not bothering with order.

A quick check-over of the man’s body revealed that he wasn’t in any immediate danger. He was beat up all to hell and would have one whopper of a headache when he woke up, but he’d live.

Not, of course, that Vick honestly cared that much. To be totally honest, he was a little disappointed that he’d had to step in before Todd had the chance to give him something worse than a bloody nose. But he was a man of business and let’s face it: dead or crippled customers weren’t good for business. He had an establishment to run.

… Speaking of which, on second thought… With deft fingers, he tugged out the wallet again and opened it up to leaf through its contents. His first reaction was to wrinkle his nose—everything in there was soaking wet, including the money. What had he been doing? Swimming in the lake?

Whatever, he was an outsider and Vick, petulantly, was no longer interested in him.

Almost daintily, he extracted the money owed for the two drinks James had bought, and then, on third thought, pulled out another couple of twenties, which he felt he was owed for having to go to all this trouble.

“To apologize for being such a bother, Mister Sunderland here has generously decided to order a round of drinks for everyone. Enjoy,” he said with a wide smile, and there was a small cheer from around the crowd, accompanied by more hands patting his back before the group started to disperse, the sheep slowly flocking back to the tables and counter now that the action had ceased. They were calm and compliant once more.

Vick stood up again, dusting his hands once more after slipping the soggy bills into his pocket, giving one last glance to the battered man on the floor before looking up.

“Well, he won’t be causin’ trouble no more. You all right, Todd?”

The burly man had gotten to his feet and remained at Vick’s side, staring down at his attacker through swollen eyes.

“Yeah,” came the gravelly rumble of a reply, though he didn’t move his gaze away from the man in the green coat. “… M’leg’s pretty bad, though… motherfucker came outta fuckin’ nowhere…”

“You just can’t trust outsiders, Todd. I’m sorry. I should have been keeping an eye on him—it was a lapse of judgment. I thought he was too drunk to do anything… stupid.”

That was partially a lie. He’d known damn well that the stranger, ‘James Sunderland’, had seen what was going on. And, like so many other outsiders, not understood it. They were quite a misunderstood bunch, his little flock. And really, even the bigger flock, shepherded by God, was misunderstood, too. So many ignorants in this place, tourist and townsfolk alike, looked at them like they were insane and skirted wide paths around the ones who preached in public.

But that aside, he had also seen the fear that lurked behind the surliness. That stranger’d had a yellow streak as wide as the sun, and Vick had mistakenly assumed that he wouldn’t try to interfere…

But no. That wasn’t the whole truth either.

Secretly, he’d been a little curious to see what would happen, too.

“Ain’t your fault, Vick,” Todd said quietly, his lips hardly moving more than enough to make his beard rustle slightly. And then, even quieter… “… wanna teach this boy a lesson.”

Ah. Here came another one.

Vick waited.

Sure enough, Todd’s oily black stare lit up and he lifted one of his heavy boots, bracing it over his defeated opponent’s face, barking, “I’m gonna stomp the bastart’s ass-ugly FACE in!”

He brought his sasquatchian foot down like he was going to do just that, but Vick moved fast and planted both hands against the trucker’s broad shoulders, shoving him firmly but gently away from the man on the ground.

“No.”

Todd was much bigger than Vick but he moved backwards compliantly, even though his face was still crumpled up with rage, the angry tears once more starting to leak from the corners of his eyes.

“HE DESERVES IT!” the burly man howled, his face reddening again.

“Of course he does, but you can’t. I taught him a lesson for you,” Vick said soothingly, in the practiced tone of voice he always used with Todd. Always used with people who were long-time recipients of his medicine. “Look, now, everyone’s looking over here again. You don’t want to make them think anything is wrong, do you?”

Todd hesitated, then slowly lowered his foot to the floor again.

“No…” he said reluctantly.

“Then you mustn’t make a fuss. No use in exacting unnecessary punishment, even on the deserving, is there?” Vick smiled up at him, moving his hands to Todd’s shoulders and giving them a pat.

“No…” Todd mumbled again, a little petulantly, clenching his fists at his sides but obediently staying put.

“Besides, weren’t you and your friends watching the news earlier?”

At the blank stare he received in response, Victor nodded amiably and quickly amended, “Of course not, you were too busy enjoying yourself with your friends. Well, a body was discovered in town earlier. The police were involved. You know what the church thinks of the police.”

Finally distracted from the prior incident, Todd turned his eyes down to look at Vick’s, bushy brows rising in surprise from under the brim of his hat.

“Did… it have anythin’ to do with the Org—?”

“No! No, not one of ours. An isolated incident—the body didn’t even belong to a local,” assured Vick. “But you know how it is. Every time something like this happens, the cops come crawling out of the woodwork, sticking their noses into all kinds of places where they’re not welcome. And we don’t want them looking too closely at our cozy little establishment here, do we?”

There was a long pause before realization finally dawned on Todd’s face as he realized why he’d been stopped from grinding the green-coated man’s face in with the heel of his boot until it was unrecognizable. He had always been a little slow on the uptake. A deep-throated chuckle came rumbling up and he clasped Vick’s shoulder warmly.

“Always the smart one, you are,” he said appreciatively.

“Yes, well,” said Vick modestly, gently prying Todd’s fingers off of his shoulder before they left indents. He had always been a little unaware of how strong his grip was, too. “That’s why I’m the one running this joint, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Todd nodded, then fell silent as his gaze drifted back over to James. He regarded the battered figure again quietly. “… I wasn’t doin’ a thing wrong,” he said, a little unsurely.

“That’s right.”

“I jus’ like pretty ladies. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”

“Of course there isn’t,” Vick said patiently, knowing that Todd needed reassurance every once in awhile. All of his sheep did.

“Th’little slut deserved it. And so did he, tryin’ to get in my way.”

“Exactly. The girl simply should have known better than to tease you.” A quick glance around the room yielded no sign of the little girl, so Vick assumed that the brat had grown a brain cell and left. In reality, he wasn’t planning on letting anything happen to her—the only thing worse for business than dead customers was dead children, and although he had allowed it to go perhaps too far out of morbid curiosity, the last thing he wanted was to make things harder on himself. Besides, even he had his limits.

He turned back to Todd, taking the dish towel from his shoulder and reaching up to dab some blood from below the trucker’s left eye.

“And so should Mister Sunderland down there. It’s not your fault they didn’t leave you alone. You’re one of God’s people now, and the outsiders shouldn’t torment you so.”

“Yeah,” said Todd, holding still like an obedient child. “… But it happened again, didn’t it. I went crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, Todd,” Vick said firmly, because a few white lies here and there were needed sometimes, to help people stumble towards the light. Who cared if they sinned a little on the way? All would be forgiven in the end. “… But yes, you had a little bit of an episode there.”

“Oh.” Looking a little ashamed, Todd turned his gaze down at the ground. “Sorry ’bout the table.”

“Don’t be. If it weren’t for that damn outie, you wouldn’t have broken anything,” said Vick. Then, upon thinking about the little girl, he hastily added, “Well. Hardly anything.” Then, growing serious once more, he clapped his hands back onto Todd’s shoulders, lending an extra firmness to his grip. “But we can’t have you having more of these episodes, can we? It’s been awhile since you were in here last, Todd, so how long has it been since you’ve had your medicine?”

Todd pulled off his hat sheepishly. “That’s what I was gunna ask about… th’last bag you gave me ran out ’bout three weeks back… was the last leg of a hard trip.”

“Yeah, I thought that might be it,” said Vick, injecting a slightly disapproving tone into his voice. “You should have come to me sooner, Todd.”

“Yeah…” mumbled Todd, looking a little chagrined, but there was a greedy light in his eyes and a longing sound to his voice. Like Pavlov’s dog, he knew what was coming next.

“Luckily, I knew what you needed the moment you started falling into temptation,” Vick said smoothly, and reached into his pocket to retrieve the thing he’d been walking into the back to fetch in the first place when the green-coated man had stopped him, ironically delaying what would have been the cease-and-desist order on Todd’s behavior towards the child.

The plastic Ziploc bag was smooth on his palm, though it contents, a rustly mass of dried stems, roots, and white petals, crackled as he handed the bag over with an easy smile. But those were all for show. The seeds—the seeds were where the medicine was. In fact, the real drug was stronger, its essence tapped and converted into things that could be inhaled or injected. But the pretty frippery was what drew the tourists in. It just looked nice. Like buying pressed flowers or fancy incense. No harm done… or so they thought. In reality, they were being primed for the harder stuff once the seeds agreed with them enough to make them want more… and they always did. It was a business, of course—a business that had dwindled considerably in the past fifteen years or so, admittedly, but a business all the same—and you had to keep them coming back.

“This should do you until the next time you pull through my little roadside church, son.”

“Yer a life-saver, Vick,” rasped Todd, stuffing the bag into the breast-pocket of his windbreaker as though worried that if he didn’t press it close to his body, it would disappear. “I owe ya everything… speakin’ of which, how much does it come to this time…?”

“Don’t worry about that, I think this one can be on the house,” Vick said benevolently, clapping Todd on the shoulder before turning around and starting to brush the broken glass from the bottle into his hand so that he could throw it away. “Consider it my apology for allowing this idiot here to cause so much distress.”

“Yer a life-saver,” Todd repeated, before slowly drawing the bag out of his pocket again and looking at it closely, weighing it in his hand. “… Say, Vick, aint’ there a little less in here than usual?”

“Oh yes, that’s literally the last of my stock,” the bartender said instantly, without skipping beat. “You know how that idiot Norman always takes forever to deliver more of the magic. I figured your case was urgent, so you can have it all. Just means you’ll have to stop by again a little sooner than you usually do, eh?”

He grinned broadly at Todd, whose automatic response was to grin back and nod. Sheep were simple beings.

“Oh, yeah, right, right,” he said agreeably, shoving the bag back in. Then he fell silent for a time. When he spoke up again, it was quiet once more, and a little worried-sounding. “Hey… my leg. It kinda hurts, Vick.”

“Hm?” Vick turned his head and looked down to where blood was slowly oozing through the denim of Todd’s jeans, courtesy of the glass that Vick had been patiently waiting to see how long it would take the trucker to remember was there. Long-time users of the medicine picked up little quirks like that sometimes. But when he saw the wound, he widened his eyes and drew in a sharp breath, as though surprised. “Jesus, Todd, why didn’t you say something sooner? Come on, let’s get one of the boys to drive you to Alchemilla…”

He dumped the glass into a wastebasket and waved over to the patchwork-chinned man, who had returned to the bar with the rest of the group. Somehow, despite the fact that his hat never seemed to leave his eyes, he defied all logic by perking up instantly and scooting away from the counter to trot over, carefully stepping over the fallen James, who hadn’t stirred once since his eyes had shut.

“Sammy, you sober enough to drive?” Vick asked.

“Hardly buzzed, sir!”

Yeah, right. But whatever. Vick sure wasn’t gonna drive the poor sap himself. He nodded. “Then why don’t you drive Todd to the hospital? He needs more than what I can give him for that leg. Surprised he’s still standin’ on it.”

He wasn’t surprised, actually. White Claudia did that. Take it long enough and there were certain things you didn’t even notice anymore. It was amazing how long the human body could endure something if it wasn’t aware that it was in pain.

“Sure thing, Vick!”

“Right, well, off you g—wait.” Vick pointed a finger at Todd’s breast pocket where he knew the bag was hidden. “Remember to get rid of that before they let you in—you know they don’t approve much of my kind of medicine ever since the damn doctors broke off their alliance with us. Hand it off to one of your buddies to hang onto or something.”

“Hell, I’ll take it!” Sammy said enthusiastically, as Vick knew he would.

He also knew that Todd wouldn’t be getting that bag back once Sammy had it, and that he’d just need to come crawling back for more, at which point Vick would just be forced to shrug and say it killed him to do it, but he had to make a living somehow, and, well, Todd would just have to cough up a little if he wanted more. Vick had a business to run, after all.

Watching Sammy help Todd hobble to the door like a scarecrow trying to support a grizzly bear, Vick shoved his hands into his pockets. Well, that was one problem taken care of. After a moment, his eyes slid back over to the unconscious man on the floor.

Now to take care of the other one.

"I need a few of my boys to come help me with this,” he called over to the counter. “Having this sack of shit lying around won’t be very good for business if any tourists happen to drop by. We’ll put him out back and if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll get the hell out of dodge when he comes to.”

As a few of the ‘boys’ (he couldn’t call them sheep to their faces, after all. For some reason, most people got upset at that association) got up with thunks and scrapes of stool legs, heading over to help Father Vick lift the unconscious man (who moaned and stirred feebly) up off the floor to move him awkwardly towards the back door, the only eyes that were paying any attention were blue, narrowed, and watching very carefully from where their owner had hidden behind the pay phones that had started all the trouble in the first place.