Pretty Dead City He started thinking Joey and Lance were on wheels, rolling backwards as he slashed his way forward. He saw glimpses of them between grotesque masks and painted grins, but they didn't seem to notice him and they weren't helping. It wasn't hard to kill the creatures. They screeched and bled and fell down. He looked at the glass-eyed corpse of a voluptuous young woman in a diaphanous dress and wondered why he killed her. Then he raised his bloodstained sword and struck again.
They didn't try to run and they didn't seem to be attacking. They just stood there like a living wall between him and. And.
A living wall between him and.
"JC?" he said into the din. His voice was sucked up and tossed around by all the other sounds.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and flinched, but he knew it. "What are we doing?" he said.
Another hand on his waist, lips, breath on his ear and JC's voice: "Focus."
He shivered and felt hot and wanted to turn around, but JC was already gone.
He looked around and saw only more and more faces, more and more of them in rows, tides of them.
"There weren't this many of you before," he said. He lifted his arm with the sword and it trembled with exhaustion. Sweat was trickling in sluggish streams down his back. It was getting hard to breathe again.
One of them, a short man in a silver-shiny waistcoat, leaned forward and said, "You're wasting your time."
Chris cut him down.
"Fuck, we're stuck in some kind of glamour again," JC said next to him.
Chris turned to him but he wanted to go back to looking for. Looking for.
"Maybe we should go to plan B," JC said. He was breathing heavily and his face was sweaty under the blood. The shirt clung wetly to his body, and it wasn't white anymore, anywhere.
"You have a plan B?"
"I don't think this is happening," JC said. "They keep- There are so many more of them now. All this. It's like. Maybe they're not really there."
Chris looked at JC's bloody face, reached out and touched him, smeared the blood around, over his mouth, over his forehead.
"So this is just me hallucinating, then?" he asked.
JC licked his lips, licked at the blood and made a face. "They're good. They're good at this. It's what they DO."
"But--"
"We're wasting our time."
"Is there even time here?"
JC just looked at him, a hint of exasperation in his red-rimmed eyes. Chris looked around. This passive, dumb resistance was getting on his nerves. It seemed so unnatural.
But on the floor.
There was blood. But no bodies.
"The bodies--" he started, but when he looked up, JC was pulling off his sodden shirt and Chris' words dried in his mouth. He wondered how he could feel-- in this fucked up situation, how he could still feel the desire to grab JC and push him down on the floor and kick his legs apart and just--
"Here, if we cover our eyes, we could." He stopped. "If we don't see them, we can't."
"You're nuts," Chris said.
"I'm not the stupid fuck who got us into this," JC said and ripped a strip off the hem. "Stand still."
"Hey--"
"Stand still."
The rag smelled of blood and felt sticky and unpleasant on his eyes. "What's the point of this?"
Blind, he could hear more, like his ears immediately went into hyper mode. He heard.
He heard.
The rip of fabric.
JC's quick, shallow breaths.
His own heart beating.
What sounded like.
Like wind howling in an empty building.
"JC--" he said. "Dude, what."
JC was there, right next to him, hot and damp under his hands, slick skin and, and, more slick skin. "They're gone," he whispered, hot breath in Chris' ear. "They're not there anymore."
"How?" he asked, "how did--"
JC shut him up with a kiss, open-mouthed and lewd, and Chris' body reacted like it was conditioned; his hands rose and found JC's dirty-wet hair, his hips pushed forward.
JC bit down on his lower lip. Hard.
"Do you remember what you did?" he asked, his hands hard and unforgiving on Chris' shoulders. Chris almost said, "what?" before he realised that he knew.
"No," he said.
"Liar," JC whispered and his hands slid up Chris' shoulders to his throat.
Quickly, quickly, like he was afraid - was he afraid of JC? Afraid of JC? Hell, yeah - he said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't know what it would do. I just wanted--"
"Liar," JC said and kissed his throat, licked the angle of his jaw.
"Yeah, sure, good that you-- We could maybe talk about this later--"
Chris heard it clearly, and JC must have, too, because he stiffened and raised his head.
It was a soft little sound, half-gasp, half-cry.
"What was--" Chris started, but JC clapped a hand over his mouth.
There it was again. Maybe a whimper, a wet, breathy whimper. The last sound of a dying animal.
"Don't take off your blindfold," JC whispered. "It's a trick."
There was silence again. They were still, JC held Chris like a vice, and they were perfectly still. In the stillness, Chris' brain seemed to take a few tottering baby steps and he thought of things he hadn't thought of in a while. He tried to speak, but got nothing but the taste of blood on JC's hand.
He bit and got a breath and, "Lance, Joey, where are they? And."
There was still a white spot there. Lance, Joey and.
He struggled. It was hard, his limbs were leaden and JC was so strong, so strong and wouldn't let go.
He tore loose and JC screamed at him, "Don't take it OFF!"
But he did, and saw JC press his hands to his cloth-covered eyes, hard. Then Chris turned around.
The feeling was pretty similar to the one he got after a good amusement park ride - stepping off it, the world kept on spinning in mad circles around his head. The sensation of speed while standing still.
Everything was plain, grey concrete, plain, grey concrete walls and a plain, grey concrete ceiling. A plain grey concrete floor, apart from a spreading pool of dark, dark red. It was spreading towards him and he took a step backwards.
Behind him, JC was muttering under his breath, quick, rushed sentences. Chris didn't even try to make out the words. He took another step backwards.
There was no sign of the crowd. The blood on the floor was darker than the bright party blood they were covered in.
His eyes kept skidding over the spot. He knew. Of course he knew, but not yet. Couldn't bring himself to look. Yet.
Joey and Lance sat on the floor, holding hands like lost children.
Chris noticed he was biting his lip and tried to stop.
The air looked thick with scattered light. He wondered if this was real, or if the street and the light and everything were figments of their imaginations, too. He didn't know what he'd done. He didn't know jack about spells. He didn't even believe in this. Not really.
While his eyes kept sliding over the one spot in the big, echoing hall he needed to look at, he thought, if you die in your dreams, you really die. What if you die in somebody else's dream?
That brought the next question, which was, whose dream is this, anyway?
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