Re: Jack and Louis: warzone - No. 17
Louis saw the way Jack looked back at him. There was nothing to do but smile, wan and brief and utterly out of place, a reflexive reaction from years of returning odd looks. When people looked at you sideways, smiling worked the best. Even with a nightmare golem hunting them down, that still felt like the easiest response. They would get through this, one way or the other.
He was stepping inside - just one more footfall and he would be within the doorway - when Jack's hand yanked him back. He had been outside himself for a moment there, thinking of where they might hide, how close behind them the monster might be, whether there might be machinery or deep rooms they could lock.
But there was no pumphouse inside the pumphouse. There was a first world war trench and a hail of gunfire, and a bomb going off just a short way to their left. He thought he heard the wails of dead men, but that might be in his own imagination, or in the memory of something else - dying limbless men, crying out for help from a less tangible god, hearts open to another variety of salvation. If nothing else, it was an efficient vulture. Where the human fear of death opened the heart to a new breath of faith, it would find the hole.
The door had shut behind them, but even so. Backward was also death. Nevermind, however - in the room, it began to rain.
Rain? This was a monsoon, the water slashing down hard enough to punish the mud from their skin, then harder, hard enough to chip rocks and make divits in the muddy ground, hard enough to whip holes through the barbed wire and flay flesh from bone.
He slid across and covered Jack's body with his own. Another bomb fell, just ten feet to their left, but his weight prevented Jack from moving, and the gunfire came to a halt a second or two later.
Blood was running in rivulets toward the trench before them, gathering in little valleys and craters in the mud. Was it real?
In the desert, the rain would have been a miracle, hard prayed for. He rolled off Jack. It was slowing to a trickle, gentle now, and warm.
He laughed, facing up, and caught water in his mouth. He turned his head, spat it out, and looked at Jack, eyes bright, irises flashing flat gold as a pair of coins. He sat up, offered Jack a hand.
"Come on then," he said. He was easy, light, bemused, apparently, by everything. And his accent had veered hard west - Dublin from Edinburgh. "Poor thing. Soaked to the skin." His skin was hot to the touch. "We'll get you put right."