Helena is the (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lionessrises) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} rooms,@ 2014-07-11 21:44:00 |
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Who: Helena and her Magical Menagerie of Monsters
What: A few more Silent Hill monsters
When: Following her incident with the nurses to ~currentish
Where: Around Silent Hill
Rating/Warnings: Here there be blood, violence, and monsters.
In the hours after the nurses, the girl once known as Helena threw up, raided a drug store and then a hardware store, and went to the little diner as worn, bloody industrialized buildings restructured themselves into the same worn, faded places they had been before. The diner, however, had a mostly stocked freezer. Devoid of any customers, human or monster, she fried eggs on the range, over easy, and ate one after another while the next one cooked. Bacon went down next, thick and sizzling and utterly delicious.
After that, she'd left to return to her little dingy apartment. This place, wherever the fuck she was, had monsters, not parademons, but they died just the same. Each time they died, she survived, and surviving meant there wasn't time for anything else.
~*~
The following days were reduced to sleeping when the sky was gray (never when it was black, never when the nightmare took over), to learning, to fashioning weapons. And in between, she saw the people. Mostly the Order, as they liked to be called. (She had followed them once when they went scurrying back into their church after the air raid siren, when gray turned bloody black.) She learned of their demon, Alessa, who controlled the nightmare and of their god waiting to be reborn.
She had never gone back after that first time. She knew crazy, knew how it tasted sparkle bright on the tongue like trying to eat Fourth of July sparklers without getting burned. That wasn't needed now and besides, she felt more for the girl, Alessa. Deemed a monster undeserving of any sympathy by her town, was it any surprise what she gave them in return? No, she understood that.
It didn't mean that she let any monster crossing her path live.
~*~
Like the church, Brookhaven was also initially avoided. It held the Valley of Broken Dolls, that hallway where nurse after nurse had died by her hands. It didn't need to be revisited now that she knew what was there. Instead she wandered from building to abandoned building.
(It was in the abandoned school that she first met the children. Burned, every rolling twist of their head made blackened fresh crack to reveal setting sun cinders beneath. They all cried, "Hels! Hels!" in a voice she knew and it hurt as she'd taken her pipe to each and every one. They never fought back, only clawed at her, grabbed her clothes as if she was their last life line, leaving her clothing smoking and her skin red while they screamed for her, again and again until her nostrils stung. No tears came. Not the first time, not the fifth time, not the tenth.)
In the gray, other monsters came. Those ones she had met the first day, lying still on the road until they clambered to their feet and jerked towards her to spit acid from their bellies. There were the slurpers who rushed and knocked her down the first time before shoving their long snouts on her. (The first one's tongue had slithered out to lick up her neck and cheek, clubbed ends of arms on her wrists, holding her down while she snarled.) They were, by far, the easiest to kill, with their urges and the way they always seemed to position themselves over her. (She'd twisted, used her feet to kick at the thing until she'd managed to get away and get to the knife she kept under her pillow. It died in a rain of shrieking red.)
(The monster with dual blades as a head was the most lethal she'd met yet. Both curved like the grin only the mother of a hammerhead could love, yet the blades of its' smile was split down the middle with teeth and a lolling tongue in between. It growled before it attacked, and she had brought her pipe down on it so hard that she heard vertebrae crack. After, when it had stopped moving, she took out her knife and cut it until she could get the head blades free. It took her longer to clean out the tissue from inside them, but once she could fit her hands inside, they made for lovely new weapons. Heavy, but better, sharper.)
Days waged into weeks and weeks into months. On the walls of her living room where a TV should be she kept a tally, and soon she wasn't counting by the days that passed, but how many she had killed. Some were harder than others.
Like the mannequins in the warehouse. All perfectly molded plastic that looked exactly like Kara. Kara with her hair down. Kara with her hair up. Kara with styled hair. With a bald head. In the center of it all had been the girl that looked like Kara so much that Helena's legs had given out and she'd had to crawl across the filthy floor to reach her friend. She hadn't been able to stop repeating her name ("Kara, Kara,") and the girl on the table, thick leather restraints around her wrists and ankles had cried ("Help me, help me!"). None of it helped, her skin went from warm to cool textured plastic as her fingers struggled over the buckles. Up and up it went, even as the-girl-that-was-Helena tried to get her off the table. It was too late and Kara was nothing more than a store display.
She had stumbled back, the scream caught in her throat, only to vanish when mannequin arms and legs had come scrambling forward, a giant tarantula made of parts and holding heads cut in half.
It ran lover's hands over her frozen form before popping off her head and dropping it down on the floor where it bounced. She shoved both hands against her mouth to keep from screaming as she fled the warehouse. Fleeing was weakness.
She came back every day. Watched it happen again and again, that same slow transformation from real living girl to girl on display, regardless of when she arrived. It never mattered. If she came early, if she came late, it was always Kara strapped down to the table being changed. By the tenth time, she learned. The tenth time was different as she whispered her apologies against lips that were every bit as soft as she remembered and then drove her knife through the soft underbelly of not-Kara's chin and into her brain.
It wouldn't have killed the real Kara.
It killed this version.
The tears still wouldn't come as she bent over the half-transformed body of her best friend.
She did not flee, but walked out, bile burning in her throat. That night, she went back to her apartment, she sharpened her knives and the blades taken from the head of the dual bladed monster.
(The next one walked on long, curved blades like stretched out scythes, a head protruding from between its legs. Even if she had never seen the face, she would have known by the torso, a form she'd known in two separate worlds. It skittered forward, crab walking on blades, and she had taken the high ground, jumping down from a catwalk onto its torso, knife driven deep, south of its sternum where all was soft tissue until she felt the knife skid off the spiked bones of its spine. Her efforts were rewarded with spurts of blood and the creature collapsing beneath her.)
And the girl that was Helena, who came into the town as faded and cracked as the abandoned buildings that lined every street when the fog rolled in, began to paint herself in viscera of monsters. Let the Purifiers, those hallowed ones of the Order that couldn't dare to breathe the air of the nightmare without having it filtered through a gas mask, let them live in fear.
The nightmare came.
She breathed in deep.
She hunted.