Re: Silent Hill: Wren/Evie/Luke/Jack
[Jack didn't say a word to Luke, all the way up the stairs. He nodded when Luke repeated the number of the apartment where they were to meet Wren and Evie. He stayed close enough beside his friend to take a healthy splattering of whatever fluid flowed through the monsters when they were struck. He kept his eyes open, emptied his head of thoughts, and kept moving.
Because that was the important thing. In the darkened apartment building, everything that approached them - scuttling, weeping, moaning - had the face of someone he recognized, moved with a familiar slide. One looked like a twisted woman with a snapped back, her skin whipped to bloody rags, and the sight of her dug a knife of disgust and recognition deeper than he knew anything could. He doubted now that he and Luke saw the same things in this place. They saw things in themselves, secrets, unspoken of, made physical and impossible to ignore. Sometimes striking them with the crowbar he'd pulled from his pack was as satisfying as crushing an insect. Sometimes it felt like shutting the door on something that should have always remained in the dark.
And so many of them looked like women. Was that just him? It had to be. One hulking male creature without hands tried to sidle through a doorway on a landing, but it was slow enough that he could cripple it with the knife from behind, leaving it to moan uselessly on the floor, grotesque and meaningless.
Evie looked better than Jack had expected, despite the gun. Bloody and dirty, but mostly sane. What did that mean? Wren had tucked herself into the closet, and the floor was littered with dead things that had no names or faces.] No. [They couldn't stay here, and they wouldn't. He slid into the apartment and watched Luke kick back a burning child, and clearly Wren was further gone than Evie was. As for himself, he had nothing to say, watching Luke pull Wren away, dark-eyed, spattered with black blood. He had worked to leave his thoughts behind him, to not recognize what was too real her. Shutting everything down had worked in the past, as had channeling his energy into the will to protect everyone else. Seeing his surroundings didn't make him all that keen on surviving. It could be hard to remember why, when all the old demons grew flesh and came calling.]
Keys. [After a silence too long, and quietly.] We need those keys.