Archer Avery (arcarius) wrote in horror_story, @ 2013-05-22 02:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | archer, complete, cycle002, npc |
Live with Honor...
WHO: Archer... and whatever's left of Michael Donnelly
WHEN: 16 January, after 6PM in the evening
WHERE: the Donnelly home
WHAT: There's blood being spilt all over his town; there's so little the sheriff can do. But he can do this.
WARNING: NPC death, Archer's usual bad language
Outside, Archer dry-heaved, shaking with the effort. Hunter had thrown up after finding the Garrets and Kingsley; the evidence had been in the grass. Archer didn’t have anything in his stomach to duplicate her reaction but his body was sure as fuck trying.
He’d seen a lot, this last month or so, enough that he should be inured to the horrors being inflicted on Crows Landing. He’d made a point to look at Bran’s mutilated body after the accident, so that his parents wouldn’t have to see him like that, have that as their last memory of their son. He’d seen corpse after corpse laid out on Frankenbrit’s slabs in the funeral home basement, piling up to capacity. He’d seen the wreckage of the whole fucking thing when the O’Neill Mortuary and Crematorium was blown sky high, body parts, fragments of body parts, smears in charred grass. Hell, he’d focused on those things, easier to deal with than the fire burning itself out. Fucking hated fire and now it was in his pores again from handling the fallout of the Regency Meadows fiasco, and the smell of smoke clung to him even after a shower and fresh uniform.
Still no time to shave. No, he’d been too busy killing a fellow cop.
He’d seen a lot but before now Archer had been an observer for most of it. Too late to save O’Brien, too late to know there was anything wrong with that St. Claire kid, too fucking late and too fucking busy trying to put out metaphorical and physical fucking fires all around the town. Never got there in time to rescue, only to recover... when it was possible, and it didn’t stop bodies from going missing or blown up, now did it? In time to mutter condolences and bark questions and maintain an outward calm in the face of the panicked and the put-upon, asking why their sheriff didn’t have whatever the fuck this was under control.
The only person he had to talk to these days was his dead best friend, which said something about his state of mind and his self-enforced isolation. Maybe he would’ve told the crackpot coroner about seeing O’Brien’s ghost if Frankenbrit hadn’t been killed. Archer damned well wasn’t telling his sister, Penny: she hadn’t seen O’Brien when both cops, living and dead, stopped by the house to see the kids last week. He’d been keeping her at arm’s length for a while now, the same way he’d distanced himself from Hunter. Yesterday, though, Archer did have words with Penny, telling her to take the girls and get the fuck out of the county, out of the state, and never mind that her husband was MIA. He’d given her Av’s address in California, which had produced more yelling since she hadn’t known her older brother had tracked their little sister down.
Hopefully Penny was gone by now. Because Archer didn’t think he could look her in the eye anymore, not after this. This flew in the face of everything he’d stood for, the tenets of law and order he’d settled onto his broad shoulders. He always said there was a difference between legal and illegal, right and wrong. For people that held stock in such concepts, moral and immoral; ‘right and wrong’ worked well enough for Archer Avery until recently. Right now, he wasn’t sure how dark the grey area was in between those two things, but he absolutely knew he’d erred on the side of illegal. Anything he did from here on out, he’d carry that with him.
The world was more than such labels or snappy little slogans; his calling was more than simply ‘to serve and protect.’ He wanted to live with honor and die with dignity, if at all possible, and figured every cop deserved that. If you weren’t on the job, you didn’t get it, the way you were expected to take care of everyone and find all the answers. Furthermore, as sheriff, there was a gulf between you and the rest of the folks that bled police blue: you were top cop, elected and removed just outside the camaraderie and brotherhood of your fellow officers, responsible for all and friend to none. When O’Brien was alive, the gulf was a shallow gully. Now it was a fucking ocean, with officers drifting out with the tide in a way he just didn’t fucking get.
At first, a number of days ago, Archer just thought Officer Michael Donnelly was mad at him for not promoting him to sheriff’s deputy straightaway. Calling in sick? That was bullshit. Donnelly was probably sulking or something. No lost love between O’Brien and Donnelly, Donnelly with his boasting of seniority, teeming with bitter self-importance. Archer just couldn’t see Donnelly at O’Brien’s desk, even if he did have that fucking seniority, and it was harder still given that Archer had a dead Brannon O’Brien tagging along with him to most of the crime scenes. Because it was hard to focus on the ghost and the job at the same time, more and more he’d taken to telling O’Brien to wait in his office, wait in the car, fucking anything that gave Archer back some of his headspace to deal with the mounting crises. Donnelly’s continued absence had been noted with the same resignation that Archer felt creep up on him every time he checked the blotter, heard from dispatch, saw another Crows Landing native show up dead. An officer playing truant wasn’t a priority, even when the sheriff needed every man he could get. Let the bastard call in sick.
But when Michael Donnelly just didn’t reappear, Archer decided he’d waited too long to investigate, to talk to the man himself and get their shit squared away. A seething sort of resentment bubbled under the stoic cop’s emotional armor this evening, because stupid fucking Donnelly was MIA -- or, fine, okay, actually sick -- and he had a fucking cruiser that Archer could use right now. Resources weren’t just depleted, they were gone. If Michael skipped town after one of his kids had been reported missing, and had the other kid covering for him, he was more of a bastard than Archer’d ever given him credit for.
Then his daughter -- not even the missing one Tatum, but Teagan, the one that had been covering for her old man to dispatch -- had been found shot to death. In Mike McBrayer’s trailer. With an equally shot-to-death McBrayer. The need to find Michael Donnelly became a hell of a lot less about a wayward cop and more about a death notification. Calls to his home and mobile phone netted zip. Well, it was news a man deserved to hear in person, anyhow.
Warning bells went off before Archer parked his battered cruiser near Michael’s, at the corner of Orchard and Maple. He couldn’t put his uneasiness into words, which just increased his agitation. It wasn’t just about the dead kid -- one of too many -- and it wasn’t O’Brien tagging along; he’d stayed put back at the station, talking to his cowboy hat or some shit like that. O’Brien as a ghost talked at least as much as a corporeal O’Brien did. Sometimes it was comforting. Today it’d just been... grating.
Exiting the vehicle with his hand hovering near his hip, Archer had drawn his gun and flashlight before he’d taken any more steps toward the house. That feeling washed over him again, the deja vu not-quite-rightness, a cop’s gut instinct combined with something he just couldn’t categorize. The lights were on inside -- okay, so the flashlight was probably overkill, but procedure -- but there was no response to Archer stomping onto the small deck, pounding on the door with his arm, and roaring out instructions to open up. The knob didn’t turn, locked, and he wasn’t about to bust down the front door without some equipment and probable cause. Still, there wasn’t anything that said he couldn’t check the perimeter. He had an AWOL officer, after all. Nothing wrong with that. Was the responsible thing to do, Archer rationalized as he peered into the picture window by the door before stepping off the porch and picking his way around to the rear of the property.
The back door was unlocked and Archer availed himself of the opportunity to use it, sliding open the glass cautiously. Illegal entry? Sure. But on Donnelly’s side of the equation it was dereliction of duty at a time when life had gone completely fucking sideways in the Landing. A good cop didn’t do that. Some deputy he’d turn out to be if Archer found him drunk in front of the couch. He could actually picture Donnelly going off to find his kid, hauling her back here, and employing his own brand of discipline for causing her sister worry and him the headache of having to deal with it, only to increase that punishment for Tatum when Teagan turned up dead. Maybe the father found out about Teagan somehow. Maybe right about now Donnelly was ripping down yellow CAUTION tape around McBrayer’s trailer and setting fire to the whole fucking thing. Fire was popular this week.
If Archer had been alert before he ducked his head into the home, the smell clicked that sense of alertness into high gear. His hand tightened on his service weapon, finger to the side of the trigger, as he stepped cautiously in, using the flashlight across his arm to sweep any available corners the house lights could miss. The smell, the fucking smell. A thought occurred to him -- he killed the other kid, he fucking lost it and killed the other one -- and slipped away in favor of facts he could see and hear and file away. And smell. It should’ve been sad that Archer thought it wasn’t exactly death but it was ripe, filthy, a latrine-and-chemical blend that was quickly replacing the undertones of smoke that Archer couldn’t shake from this morning. He halted just inside the doorway, proceeded through the ground floor, stopped beside the grandfather clock and stilled. His heartbeat hammered faster than the clock’s ticking.
Archer went upstairs. He ducked his head into every room, swept it with his light, flipped switches, called out for Donnelly. Even called out for Tatum a time or two, in case she was here somewhere, had been here all along, maybe. He stepped over broken glass, family photos dashed to the floor at some point. The fuck was going on here? Seriously, the fuck?
That question was answered, at least partially, when he got to Michael Donnelly’s bedroom. Things clicked into place for Archer in patches, his eyes alighting on things and blinking, trying to take in details because the whole thing was just too bizarre for him in this brand new bizarre world. Open windows. Peach air freshener cans. Human waste. Handcuff marks on wrists. More human waste. Blood. More of that, too. And Michael.
The shock came for Archer when he discovered that Michael Donnelly was still breathing. Wallowing in his own filth, helpless against it, imobile, blood trickling from his ears to stain an already rusty brown bloodied pillowcase... and alive. When Archer moved a few paces into the room, slowly lowering first the flashlight -- snapping it back into his belt -- and then his gun, it was impossible for his factual mind to catalogue all of this damage combined with little observational tidbits... like Michael’s empty gunbelt tossed off to the side, the case for his handcuffs empty. Like the fact that the smell of sweat could cut through the mountainous stench of waste and the copper tang of blood to still be discernible. Like the fact that Archer thought he could still hear that grandfather clock ticking, or maybe that was his pulsebeat at his neck, or the rasp of Donnelly’s -- Michael, fuck, it’s Michael! -- breathing. Like the fact that a glazed eye flickered in his general direction when Archer stepped forward. Was that a trick of the light? Archer couldn’t tell.
All of the fucking shit, the blood matted in Michael’s hair, his dry cracking lips, FUCK what was this? This was one of his cops, or the shell of him, and Archer didn’t know how he could be alive. He’d had to have been here for days, judging by the waste, the blood, the signs of dehydration. How? HOW? The answers Archer’s ordered brain was spitting out at him weren’t things he wanted to examine too closely right now.
Archer held his gun at his side, taking rapid shallow breaths and staring at Michael, approaching the bed not because he wanted to but because he fucking had to, had to see this through to the end. Call 911, his mind supplied helpfully. Radio to dispatch. Officer down. You know the codes. Get help.
Except there wasn’t anything that could help this. Archer wasn’t a doctor but the evidence was right in front of him. Michael Donnelly’s head was damned near stove in, battered and bloodied, and when Archer made himself lean over to look into those glassy eyes he couldn’t see shit. Maybe he should’ve had O’Brien here, maybe there was some ghostly way you could tell if a guy was about to shuffle off his mortal coil or what-the-fuck-ever, but Archer was alone and faced with a reality in which either Michael Donnelly continued to die slowly or he maybe made it onto machines and lived like this for however long it took for him to wither and die.
So maybe Michael hadn’t been, wasn’t, isn’t Archer’s buddy or anything, but he was a human being and this was fucking sadistic. A cop should live with honor and die with dignity. Die with dignity. Well, that was out the fucking window now, wasn’t it? Michael was lying in piles of his own shit -- and how could there be so much; had someone (Teagan, Teagan called him in sick, his own fucking kid, don’t think about it, could be wrong, could be wrong) actually fed this husk, given him water, watched him piss himself, watched life drain out of him? Had he been lucid at some point? Was there even the faintest fucking chance he was coherent now?
“Hey,” Archer ground out, unsurprised to hear that his gruff voice was level. It usually was. “Michael. You hear me?”
No visible response, just that glazed stare and that breathing and the blood.
In the seconds before Archer Avery let the decision he’d already made reach his conscious mind, he cast about for something, anything that could explain this, make sense of it. He found himself tearing open drawers, rattling the closet door, finally kicking it in with perhaps more force than was necessary and pawing through the contents. Electronics. A gun box he couldn’t get open. One, high up on a back shelf -- he only guessed because he hid his own firearms carefully when his nieces were set to come by and visit -- that he could. Dusty and dented but it opened to a nine mil that Archer vaguely remembered being issued to Michael at some point and which he’d summarily hated, preferring the sleek Smith & Wesson that was nowhere in sight.
If he had to do this, he wasn’t doing it with his own damned gun if he could help it. Everything that happened next happened rapidly: Archer tucking away his duty piece, dry firing the 9mm and then loading it, finding a pillow, approaching the bed. “Michael,” said Archer evenly, looking down into the abyss of his empty stare, “If you’re in there? Better tell me now. Otherwise I’m ending this. Hear me?”
Michael Donnelly’s eyelids flickered and slid closed. Answer enough for Archer. He put the pillow down over Michael’s face. Suffocation was no good -- he’d been breathing under his own power for a while now and it wasn’t necessarily a quick death and this had gone on for too fucking long -- but it would work as a silencer. Not that there were many people left that’d hear the shot, or many that’d care.
Archer pressed the gun to the pillow, felt it come to rest in a nest of down on Michael’s forehead, right between his eyes. “You’re a good cop,” he said, the only benediction someone like Archer could offer someone like Donnelly. If it wasn’t strictly true, fuck it.
He squeezed off the shot. Then another. Then another. Three in the head and Michael was dead, more than dead, and Archer was stalking away from the room, down the steps, the gun’s safety being flicked on through autopilot before it was shoved into a pocket of his jacket. Then things went grey for a few seconds before Archer found himself trembling and bent double outside in the cold, trying to empty an already empty stomach, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth in a futile gesture.
What the fuck was wrong with this town? What the fuck was wrong with him, seeing ghosts and killing a fellow cop? Archer made it back to his cruiser, numb, still stuck inside the smell which now included hot metal and gunpowder and singed feathers.
When he felt he could drive straight, he turned the car on and drove away, heading nowhere in particular in Crows Landing but heading straight into the deep dark hole he’d ripped inside his own head when he blasted one into Michael Donnelly’s skull.