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etheratiA random prompt on Tumblr asked for Minutemen zombies; I wrote the promised vignette but there seems to have been interest for more? So I started writing more, and wow, I am having so much fun. But I'd like to keep this informal, so, see the comment section below for pieces of this as I finish them!
part 10
Date: 2013-05-24 12:25 am (UTC)Twenty minutes and half a bottle later and they’ve got him over the sink while he spits it all up in a foamy mess. It’s all clear and the froth looks to just be beer foam--it’s like his body hasn’t processed it at all. And really, why should it?
“Okay,” Byron says, voice strained from his heaving; he grapples with the edge of the counter, sets his forehead into his arms. Talks to the sink. “Elephant in the room, here. I’m basically dead, aren’t I?”
Bill looks over his hunched back; Hollis looks right back, and pointedly reaches to turn off the tap.
“Yeah,” Bill says, because there’s never any good to be had from dancing around things. “That’s what we think. I mean, you were close to bled out by the time we got to you.”
A mangled hand reaches up, touches the bandage on his throat. One stupid second they'd dropped their guard, and... “So why with the beer?”
“Wishful thinking, I guess,” Hollis says, and he sounds honestly apologetic. “Or hell, I just plain wasn’t thinking at all. I’m sorry, you didn’t need that.”
Byron coughs into the sink again; a thin film of beer and spit drools from his mouth, and he looks even more miserable than he did before. Considering the state he's in; that’s saying something.
Bill sets his hand between the shaking shoulder blades, silent support.
“Never thought I’d say this,” Byron wheezes, halfway laughing and halfway gagging, “But I don’t think I ever want one of those again.”
"Nothing wrong with that," Ursula says. She reaches past them all to drain the rest of the bottle into the sink. “As long as you don’t strand me on martini night.”
“Heh,” Byron says, leaning heavily on the edge of the counter.
“Tch.” Ursula turns the bottle in her hand, studies the label--chucks it into the trash can. “Pisswasser.”
Hollis raises his eyebrows, mock-indignation. “Hey now, nothing wrong with--”
“Was I really trying to kill people?” Byron asks, and his voice is small but the question comes out of the blue like heat lightning.
Bill closes his eyes for a second, remembers the day the Mothman had joined their ranks. No killing, he’d said then, not ever.
“I don’t think we have any way to know for sure what you were trying to do...” Hollis trails off, the lie obvious in his voice.
It’d been only shortly after Bill himself had come on board. He’d been idealistic, fresh out of Kansas and high on his recent victories on the field and excited to have been hired to do this, to stop criminals and evildoers and it hadn’t even occurred to him that lethal force would ever be in play. He remembers feeling a little cowed by that frail-looking slip of a man who nevertheless understood more of how the world really worked than he did.
“But I was acting like...”
“Yes,” Ursula says, setting the other empty bottle back on the table.
“Like the ones that got you.” Bill leans back on the counter himself, thick hands propping him up against it. “You were...”
“Okay,” Byron says.
“Just... thrashing, and screaming, and biting...”
“Okay,” he says again, “okay.”
It’s an uncomfortable silence after that, broken up by the noise of the creatures outside, battering against the windows--and by the sound of another bottle landing in the trash can. Ursula excuses herself abruptly, disappears into the hallway.
Byron scratches at the back of his head, where the hair’s matted under the bandage that covers his bad eye. “I didn’t actually--”
“No,” Hollis says, and this time, there’s no lie there. “You didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Thank god,” Byron says, and follows suit, drawing the bathrobe up around himself and making his way unsteadily for the door.
*