Re: Looking for Jack: Evie/Wren/Luke + Jack
[The location was a church. It could have been anywhere, though - an abandoned lot, a recently occupied home, a fast food restaurant. It wouldn't have mattered. It had been home to an active congregation before the contagion began spreading through the city, and most of it was still intact. Some of the upper windows had been smashed by someone throwing rocks at imagined attackers, but the colorful glass behind the altar, dim now, was still whole.
Jack was not immediately in sight when they came inside, but the body was. A man was dead not ten feet inside the large doors that opened onto the center aisle, his blood soaking into the industrial blue carpet. It was not a clean death. There was a gun a few inches from his left hand. His back was a mess of claw marks, blood, and tattered clothing. His face, pressed flat to the floor, was out of sight, likely for the best. The blood around him had begun to congeal and grow tacky underfoot.
Bloody bootprints led away from the corpse and in the general direction of the altar. They then veered left before disappearing entirely as the blood was tracked away, but seemed to move in the direction of the vestibule door.
There were no lights on in the church, but there was sound as they drew closer, just inside the room.
Humming through the door. Jack was sitting against the wall under the windows, apparently oblivious to the incursion, and humming. There was dried blood spattered across his hands, dried in streaks around his knuckles. He didn't even look particularly sick, not like the dying people on the street. No, he wasn't dying. He was in the midst of a circuit, around and around again, better and worse, his physiology trapping him in a continuous, unending cycle of madness.
If this was madness, though, who could be bothered to care? He was at home, sitting on the floor in the bathroom, talking to Helen while she took a bath. They had talked for hours (so much to catch up on) until the water got cold. He had stepped out while she ran the hot tap again and found a man with a gun in their living room, and he had killed him. Then he had come back inside and found her none the worse for wear, which was a relief, even if he couldn't quite remember why. He joked to her that a burglar had broken in and she splashed water on him, which explained why his hair was wet. (There was blood at his temple, too, where a bloody hand had run through it.)
His head hurt, but she had the light off in the room and it was warm and comfortable there. He was going to stay until his head stopped pounding, and when they ran out of things to talk about he started humming to her. She had always liked that. Jack couldn't remember why he never seemed to be playing music anymore, why his voice felt disused and thick, but she didn't mind.
It was intimate, and peaceful, and nothing should have disturbed it. He heard, though, when footsteps came close on the carpet, and when the scent of three new people came in through the door. The fact that he could smell them didn't fit with the scene at all, and he stopped humming and cracked one eye open. His pupils were so widely dilated that his eyes looked black in the dim.]