Chapter Two: Hangover
Noah woke to silence. He groaned, trying to remember where he was.
Fuck, he thought, memories flooding back in. That was some good shit. Jesus Christ…
He glanced at the window. He’d shut the curtains, and it was dark in the room. Too dark, though. Fuck! He thought, suddenly panicking. How long was I out for? He wiped at his face, trying to reclaim some sobriety. The guys are gonna be furious…
Almost as soon as he thought it, there was a pounding at the door.
“Noah!” came Jim’s muffled voice. “Noah! Open the fuck up!”
Noah felt a spike of guilt. He hated making people wait on him. He went to stand and realised the bag of drip was still open on the coffee table. He hurriedly began scraping what he hadn’t snorted back into the bag.
“Noah! NOAH!” The pouding increased. “NOAH! Open UP!”
Noah froze. Something was wrong. Jim didn’t sound angry, he sounded panicked. Afraid. The pounding became frenzied, frantic.
He shot to his feet, abandoning the drugs, and rushed to the door. He twisted the lock and wrenched it open, cutting off Jim mid holler.
His friend’s eyes were wild. He’d never seen them like that before. So round and frightened the whites were standing out all around. There were tears on his cheeks.
What the fuck..? Noah thought. Jim took a half step toward him, just beginning to look fearfully over his shoulder. Then he was yanked bodily back through the threshold.
Noah just stood there, uncomprehending. A large, black shape had dragged his friend back out into the street. Is that a fucking bear? The shape resolved into something like clarity. No, that’s a fucking dog.
Fright held him in its grip. He knew he should do something, but what? What could he do? He knew he should help, but the thing was bigger than both of them put together. It looked like a staffy, but it was five times the size.
It had Jim by one leg, growling and wrenching its head forcefully one way then the other. Jim was screaming. It was a second before Noah recognised the pained squealing as his name.
He still couldn’t move. The enormous dog was shaking him, worrying at his leg, and the size differential was so great that Jim was being flung about like a ragdoll, slapping against the asphalt like a cheap steak flapping in a cast iron pan.
Noah took a step forward, not exactly sure what he was planning to do. The dog immediately dropped Jim’s leg and growled at him. It stepped over Jim’s body, protective and menacing. Jim was ripping his fingers apart on the concrete trying to crawl away. The muscles in its haunches bunched, and its growl deepend an octave.
Noah stepped back and closed the door.
Jim’s panicked, pathetic screaming began again. Without anything else drawing its attention, the dog had turned back to him. Noah could tell. He could hear it savaging him again.
Noah stood there until a particularly violent bark had his hand shoot to the lock and twist it. Jim’s screaming cut off as if the thin bolt of metal sliding home was some heavenly decree.
Noah stared at the door, mouth crimped into a thin line, breathing hard through his nose. His mind was spinning in place, unable to get any traction. At length, he returned to his recliner. He sat down heavily.
He stared at his feet, hands tucked into his armpits. He wasn’t sure how long he sat like that for. Eventually, he became aware of a ball of white light hanging in the corner of the room. With glacial speed, he turned his attention to it.
Yep, that’s a ball of light, he thought. Of course it is.
He studied it. The ball just hung there, up in the corner by the microwave. It bobbed up and down ever so slightly. He could see now it didn’t actually cast any light, though it seemed to be made from it. He realised he should be curious, perhaps even afraid, but all he felt was numb.
He waved his hand in front of his face, trying to see if he was getting any other visual distortions as an aftereffect of the drip. He recoiled. His left hand had black bars running down it. He drew it closer, flinched, then tried rubbing them off. Then he scrubbed at them with more vigour. Neither worked. He chose to ignore it.
He turned back to the coffee table. To the drugs. From outside, the moist, sloppy sounds of gristle ripping and bone crunching came muffled through the walls. The noises seemed to bounce off him. He refused to hear them.
Noah lowered himself to the floor with shaking arms. He accidentally dumped just about the whole bag on the table, and it took twice as long for him to corral a bit of it into something resembling a line.
He knelt before it, numb. Vaguely horrified.
Then he snorted it up his nose with a vengeance.
Noah’s face immediately began vibrating again. His legs felt funny. The colours in the room began shifting again, everything taking on a deep purple tinge. Best of all, the dread and shock and horror and confusion constricting around him uncoiled enough that he could breathe again.
Noah splayed out on the floor between his chair and his coffee table, relaxing. The sounds of wet meat being torn and chewed became metallic and distant. Everything was okay. No, that wasn’t right. Everything was not so bad.
God bless drugs, Noah thought, a stupid smile creeping across his face. Make your life not quite as bad for a while should be like, drugs’ motto, or something. He chuckled softly to himself as he wriggled about on the floor, getting comfortable.
The movement brought the funny white light hanging in the corner of the room back into view. It looked like it had shifted a couple of feet off to one side.
He gazed at it, curious. What could it be? It was clearly delineated and moving slightly, so it wasn’t light that was stemming from something. It wasn’t being cast or reflected. It seemed like a discrete object, just made from light.
What are you, funny light? he thought at it, but if the gently bobbing ball of light had any answer, it was keeping it to itself.
Noah spent the next hour sending warm vibes at the light. He was trying to decide whether it was sending any back. He didn’t think so, but he also got the feeling it was friendly. Or maybe not friendly exactly, but he definitely found it endearing. Bobbing there. Being white and matte.
What are you up to, light-bro? he thought. Why are you hanging out in the corner? That’s rude. Come here and do a line with me.
Noah’s eyes became wide as saucers as the light floated over to stop a metre or so away from him.
Woah… It can move.
Noah tipped himself upright and began racking up lines. While he worked he gaped at the light. Up close he could see that it wasn’t the pure white of washing powder or flour. It was a shade darker, like good MDMA or bad coke.
Are you a spirit guide, Mr. Ball of Light? Are you here to show me the way?
The light remained silent, floating on some unseen current.
Okay then, keep your secrets. But do a line with me.
The ball of light did not do a line. Noah did though. His slowly returning sobriety was swiftly shoved away.
He couldn’t say how long he sat there for, when all was said and done. He stared at the light a lot. He stared at his ceiling. He stared at his hands, idly running his fingers down the black bars on them. He tried not to make any noise, and eventually he became aware that there had been no noises from outside for a while.
That wasn’t strictly true, actually. The sounds of the dog eating his dead friend stopped. He thought he heard claws clicking on concrete as it took off at one point. As sobriety returned to him once more, other sounds began to filter in.
Screams, reedy and far. Sometimes closer. Gunshots, intermittent. He swore there was an explosion, off in the distance. Tyres screeched and people shouted and doors were slamming and sirens squalled. A howl, clear and piercing, drew him from his stupor.
Noah stood. The dregs of his high dragged at his brain. He glanced briefly at the pile on the table, then dismissed the longing that came with it. He’d been a fuckup for as long as he could remember, but even he had to draw a line somewhere. He snorted internally at the pun.
With effort, he turned his mind to the situation at hand. Some sort of mutant dog had savaged his friend right in front of him. He had decided that the dog had been abnormal. He had never seen a staffy that large. It beggared belief that one could be that large. It was fully outside the realm of reality.
Then there was the ball of light. Random balls of light didn’t just appear and hang around. He glanced at it again, waiting nearby. He stepped towards it, inspecting it, but couldn’t discern anything he hadn’t before. Then he gathered his courage and poked it.
Noah was mildly surprised when his hand wasn’t incinerated. In fact, he felt nothing at all. He could still see his hand, or its vague outline, through the light, but it was mostly obscured. He waved his hand back and forth through it. It wasn’t disturbed in the slightest. There was no rippling, no billowing, no distortion of any kind. The light from the centre to the outside wasn’t even disturbed by his interference. He held his hand nearby it, squinting, but the light gave off no illumination either.
It was as though the light didn’t truly exist. Like it was overlaid on reality, but not truly a part of it. It was obviously not harmful. Not so far as he could tell. It produced no light, no noise, no heat, or cold, and had no substance. It just was. He frowned, not quite sure what to make of it.
He looked at his left hand next, at the black lines running vertically down it. They were evenly spaced the whole way around his hand: back and palm. Each of his fingers was capped in black, with the vertical bars running up them and horizontal bars at the base of each one. The bars continued up his hands to where another horizontal bar ran around his wrist.
Noah pulled his sleeve up, hesitant. More black bars were revealed. With growing trepidation he pulled the sleeve of his jersey up further and further. They continued. There was another horizontal bar at his elbow. He pushed it higher, then had to remove his jersey when it kept going. He was relieved to find it finally stopped with one thicker bar capping them at the top of his bicep.
Noah ran his fingers over them. The lines were perfectly black, perfectly straight, perfectly edged. He’d never had a tattoo before, but he understood they couldn’t be this precise.
His skin wasn’t inflamed at all, either. There was no redness or pain or irritation. Just like the ball of light, it was as though this full sleeve of bars had just… appeared out of nowhere.
He spent a while inspecting the design for, simple as it was, it was a design. Eventually, he put his thoughts to one side. There was nothing he could do about it. And he had other things to do.
Noah crept over to his front window. He stood for a moment there, trying to breathe deep and even, and then tweaked the curtain back and peeked outside.
To his great relief, there was no body outside in the street. There were shreds of clothing, and a lot of blood, but he was spared the sight of his friend's mangled corpse. His breath left him in a shaky exhale. Jim was dead. He wrenched his gaze away from the scene.
His eyes travelled upwards, and a familiar sensation swept through him. He was well accustomed to seeing things that weren’t there. He was an old hand at pretending the shit he was seeing was normal. He was a pro at simply taking things at face value while he was tripping and riding them out.
Noah had been high hundreds of times. Thousands even. He’d done dissociatives and psychedelics. He’d done them so many times they got boring. He knew when he was high. He knew when he was hallucinating. He knew how to tell reality from imagination.
That was why the sight before him was so unsettling. Every single instinct, every bit of experience he had, was telling him that what was in front of him was real. He wasn’t coming down. He wasn’t seeing things. This wasn’t lack of sleep.
His mind hadn’t snapped; the world had. Like the worst hangover ever.
The apartment building across the street had been bracketed by two small parks. Now it was surrounded by a forest. On every side, enormous trees hugged the building, easily as tall -no, taller even- than the five story block. One corner of the building had been sheared clean away, replaced with one of the titanic trees. The tree itself was missing all branches and a third of its trunk down the side where it intersected the apartments.
Noah goggled at the sight. There definitely hadn’t been a forest right across the street from him a couple of hours ago. The apartment building shuddered as the tree pressing into the corner of it shifted slightly. Glass tinkled and fell to the street from abused windows. Lights flickered fitfully for a moment.
All up and down the street buildings had been either spliced randomly with ridiculously proportioned flora or completely replaced. As far as he could see, the effect ended completely after a couple hundred feet from the other side of the street, the forest from thereon in completely whole.
Bizarre, glowing flowers littered the forest floor, creating tiny islands of softly glowing light in the gloom under the thick canopy. Some grew in little patches, others strung along the trunks growing from something like ivy. Weird spindly bushes were laden with oddly coloured fruits. Others were free of fruit or flowers but were obscenely lush. A small second hand clothes store down the street had a huge mushroom growing from its centre, now acting as a second roof. Vibrant pink snake plant analogues were vibrating to some unseen stimulus.
Noah let the curtain drop and retreated, trying to gather in his spinning thoughts. He closed his eyes, trying again for deep, calm breaths, and then rushed across the room to the other side of his small unit. He said some rapid prayers, hands on the curtain for his kitchen window, before wrenching it aside as if ripping off a bandaid.
The view out the other side of his unit looked mostly normal. There was no forest, no bizarre, random enmeshment of utterly different landscapes. There were differences, however.
The sky in the west was glowing orange on the horizon, and there was a plume of thick black smoke snaking into the sky. An eight story office building further towards the centre of the city was leaning at a crazy angle over onto the neighbouring hotel. The wail of sirens and screech of tyres was stronger on this side of the house. Incongruously, a firework lanced into the sky and blossomed into pretty pyrotechnics from somewhere in the city.
Noah let the curtain fall again, breathing hard. He went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water with shaking hands. The tap gurgled and spluttered concerningly, but did eventually give up some water. He tossed it back and began pacing in the lounge.
What the fuck is happening? His mind was running in circles. It must be some kind of natural disaster, but what the fuck grafts a fucking forest into the middle of a city. Earthquake? But there’s no forests close to the city for an earthquake to shift closer. There’s no forest anywhere on Earth that looks like that anyway.
Noah paced and thought and followed different strings of logic to their end and kept coming back to the same conclusion. There was no logical explanation for this. Something completely outside human understanding had occurred. There was no other way to explain this other than he couldn’t explain what happened.
Noah always prided himself on his logic. But he prided himself even more on not worrying about things he couldn’t change. It was a fault in his character when it came to most things. But now it let him accept the obvious conclusion and move forward.
He went to sit in his recliner and briefly paused. There was a strange crystal sitting on the aged brown leather. He picked it up and sat down.
The crystal was roughly the size of a plum, and was gold and brown in halves split by a sinuous division. The golden half was sparkly, the brown half matte and lustreless. It was smooth to the touch and almost perfectly round. He put it on the coffee table next to his drugs.
Gonna need a list to keep track of weird fucking random bullshit soon, he thought, then, Right, if some fantastical natural disaster has happened then I need to know how fucked I am.
Noah took out his phone and tried to call his friend Matt. No service. He tried opening up his browser. No wifi. He turned the wifi off. No service. He tried opening maps. No service. He tossed it on the floor next to him. He stood up and fiddled with the lights. They flickered on and then went out. No power.
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Right, I guess that’s how fucked I am then: completely. He sat back down. What should I do? This is some kind of bizarre natural disaster. There’s no cell service, no power, no satellite, no internet, and my water is halfway fucked too. Next steps Noah, come on.
The drugs on the table beckoned him again. He dismissed the notion immediately. He knew too much now. The world was far beyond fucked. He had to do something, come up with a plan.
If the disaster is local, then all I need to do is wait and help will come. If it’s global, then no help is coming and if I wait I will die. If this is global then a total societal collapse is on its way. There is no way humanity will adapt to this quickly enough. Billions will die.
He thought a bit more. He wasn’t getting any satellite data. That implied the event had affected things far beyond the location he was at now.
Holy fuck, this is global. Holy fuck, he realised. He forced himself to calm down. Losing it won’t do you any good. Next steps, Noah. Next steps.
He took a quick mental inventory. I can’t stay here. The entirety of the food in his house amounted to a few more packets of ramen and some questionable eggs. The water supply won’t last either. He glanced at the door, remembering the dog. That thing could smash its way in here easily.
I have no food, no water, and inadequate shelter. I need all three. But most importantly, I need information.
Anxiety began bubbling inside him. He didn’t want to leave his nice, comfortable place where everything was familiar, where everything was a known quantity. But he was also a realist, and one thing was eminently clear: if he stayed here he would either starve to death or be at the mercy of whatever random, fantastical event next occurred.
A soft tapping on the pavement drifted in. Footsteps. He went to the window and peeked out again, just in time to see someone hurrying across the street from the apartment building, heading towards somewhere a few houses down from him. He craned his head and saw orange light spilling into the street, closing off again as a door closed behind the furtive pedestrian.
As good a place to start as any. May as well get going.
Noah suited his actions to his thoughts and started whirling around his unit.
~~~~~
Piper held herself very still. Fuckface’s cloying cologne pushed against her nose. His meaty hand was still clamped about her mouth. Her mind was racing, trying to come up with some kind of plan, but Fuckface was twice her size. There was nothing she could do.
“William! What the fuck are doing!?” Fuckface repeated.
The confused bouncer continued to swing the sword about, flailing at nothing. He was white as a ghost and his eyes looked like they were about to fall out of his head.
“OI, YOU STUPID FUCKER!” Fuckface roared at the confused man. “Pull your fucking head in!”
That finally seemed to get through to him. William stopped flailing madly around, his eyes flicking back and forth between Piper and Fuckface and a random spot in the air he was holding the sword towards. He came towards them, but cautiously, giving the invisible spectre a wide berth. He let the sword drop to his side as he met them. It was clear he was struggling not to look over his shoulder.
“What the fuck, Will?” Fuckface ground out. “What the fuck is this?” He gestured to the body in the glade.
William took a couple of shaky breaths and ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know, boss. I passed out, and when I came to I was in this fucking forest or something. Don’t know what the fuck happened. Next thing I know this fucking skinny prick’s coming at me, and…”
“Doesn’t matter,” Fuckface cut him off. “And give me that,” he said, gesturing to the sword. William handed it over without complaint, seemingly glad to be rid of it.
The blade seemed long to Piper, single-edged and slightly curved like a katana. It was wider near the tip than at the base though, and had intricate engravings set into the flat of the blade. It was stained red for half its length. Fuckface held it casually.
Piper could hear gasps and the hubbub of conversation behind them. A scream came from inside the bar. Someone started wailing. Piper felt Fuckface turn and look over his shoulder, then he spoke into her ear.
“Stay fucking close. Stay where I can fucking see you. If you try and run, I’ll fucking kill you. Understand?”
Piper said nothing. Fuckface’s hand was still clamped around her mouth.
“Understand!?” he hissed, shaking her. She nodded vigorously. It was all she could do. He gave a small, ugly grunt and released her.
Piper gave a great gasp and rubbed at her face. She glared at Fuckface, but he had already turned to face the bar. The crowd was growing, filing through the gap left where half the front wall used to be and onto the thick, lush grass.
There were about twenty people in total, all huddled together, staring around wide-eyed at the bizarre scenery. Someone inside the bar was still wailing. Another couple of bouncers made their way over to Fuckface and William.
Piper felt oddly unafraid. She already felt mostly sober, only the very last dregs of alcohol and whatever she’d be drugged with tickling around in her system. But she didn’t feel any hangover coming on either. In fact, she had a strange amount of energy. It felt like she could run a marathon. Not that she had anywhere to run.
She couldn’t run off into the forest dressed for a night out, not to mention there might be more elves or whatever the fuck that thing was out there. Her friends were still inside the bar, too. She dithered, unsure what to do, but not wanting to be anywhere near Fuckface. The man in question was considering the gathering crowd.
“Where’s Conrad? Troy?” Fuckface was asking. The bouncers looked at each to see if anyone had the answer. Fuckface pawed at his face in agitation.
“Right,” he said. “You’re gonna go to Bessie’s. See if Conrad and that young fucker we hired last week are there. Then go to Benedict Square.” He pointed at one of the bouncers. “You,” he said, pointing at the next in line. “Are gonna go find Troy. Check The Horse n Barrel, and if he’s not there, check The Gold Room. Get them back here. Bring back anyone else you see, got it?”
The two new bouncers nodded and moved off in separate directions, one skirting around a massive tree before continuing down an alley, the other down the alley next to the Mezz.
“What do you want me to do, Marcus?” the bouncer called Will asked. Fuckface rounded on him.
“That’s ‘boss’ to you, you stupid fuck! I don’t a fuck what you do!” Will shrank from him, and Fuckface sighed. “Go… go round up this crowd and get them back inside,” he said, a touch more softly. Then, “Fucking hurry up about it!” when Will just gawped at him.
Of course he’s a Marcus, Piper thought with an internal roll of her eyes. She decided she’d heard enough. Reluctantly, she shimmied around Fuckface and his cronies and slunk off towards the crowd, hoping to get there before he finished berating William.
She froze momentarily. The golden ball of light that had appeared in the bathroom had followed her outside. It hovered in the air behind Marcus and William, but somehow she knew it was there for her. She kept an eye on it as she shuffled past the arguing men, but it made no sudden moves. She dismissed it as more absurdity and began studiously ignoring it.
The people gathered in front of the bar were gazing around like animals: some in wonder, some in horror, some in fear. All of them were confused. Piper knew how they felt. She didn’t understand what the fuck was going on even slightly.
Some of the people called to her as she approached, asking her what was going on, pleading with her for clarity, as if asking nicely, as if showing her how hopelessly out of their depth they were would somehow grant her the ability to reveal just exactly what was happening.
She gave them commiserating smiles, murmured some contrite words of apology that, no, she had not a single clue more than any of them. Then Will was approaching behind, trying to shepherd everyone back indoors. He only succeeded in transferring their hopeless attention, their wheedling questions, to him instead. Piper slid through the crowd and through the ruined front of the bar.
The bar looked like a murder scene. Bodies lay strewn about the floor where they’d collapsed in the middle of dancing. People, concerned friends, partners, huddled over them. A girl had crammed herself into one corner, hugging her knees and wailing her confusion at a world that gave not a single fuck.
Piper quickly located her friends. Kira and Chloe were still out, laying on the sticky floor like discarded dolls. June was kneeling with Kira’s head in her lap, a vacant look on her face. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her head turned slowly towards Piper as she approached her, and then an approximation of life returned to her.
“Piper! What..!? What’s happening? You’ve got to help!”
Piper gave her a steady look as she knelt smoothly beside her. Shock, she thought, noting June’s wide eyes and the way they wouldn’t quite focus on her. Then she was looking Kira and Chloe over, checking their pulse and their eyes, feeling for fever, giving them a quick scan for head injuries.
Nothing, she decided. Just unconscious.
Piper widened her gaze to those nearby. She could see chests rising and falling, but she could also see more worrying signs: trickles of blood running from heads, unmoving eyes staring at the ceiling, still chests, waxy skin.
She shuffled away, making for the nearest body, ignoring June’s confused questions. She knew what she’d find. But she had to know. The cold, analytical part of her mind, the part that could listen to someone scream in pain while she tried to treat them, had to know that whatever had happened had been deadly.
A young man lay with his head cocked to the side. His hair was matted with blood from where he struck it on the floor. A spilled glass next to him, soaking half his side and stinking of rum.
Piper pressed her fingers to his throat. She recoiled before she’d even confirmed he had no pulse. He was cold as ice, and the skin of his throat was firm. Dead. Definitely dead.
The simple confirmation snapped Piper into full emergency mode. Seeing a dead person lying on the floor of the club, someone she had been dancing next to not an hour before, drove home the reality of the situation in a way that seeing an apparent elf murdered in a forest glade that had appeared out of nowhere, had not.
The analytical part of Piper’s mind took over. This entire situation is outside the bounds of what I can understand. Too chaotic. One piece at a time.
As her mind began to break the overwhelming situation into bite-sized chunks, she noticed something lying on the dead man’s chest. She picked it up, turning it over in her hand.
It was a rock, a black one. It looked like the crystals Kira had scattered haphazardly about every flat surface in her room: polished, glossy, though it had no striations or other variations in colour like her crystals often did. Piper’s light fingered tendencies absently kicked in and she slipped the crystal into her purse.
She turned and shuffled back to June and her friends. Both Kira and Chloe were still breathing -shallowly- but she would take her wins as she found them. June began babbling at her again. Piper wasn’t sure whether she’d even stopped.
“June.” Piper said flatly. Then she hissed at her when her babbling continued interrupted. “June!” Her friend’s eyes finally focused on her. “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t think anyone does. Kira and Chloe need help though. I need you to help me to help them. Can you do that?”
June nodded numbly, the barely coherent word vomit cutting off as if it had never been.
“Good,” Piper said, nodding encouragingly at her. There were some couches ringing a series of booths over against the far wall, opposite the bar. “Okay, grab Kira under the arms. I’ve got her legs. That’s it!”
They struggled a little. June was taller than Piper, and both of them were fit, but neither were particularly muscular. Eventually, they got both of their unconscious friends situated on the couches. The faux-leather was a little sticky, but it was softer and cleaner than the bar floor at least.
The gold ball of light hovered around while Piper tended to her friends. She was conscious of the fact that it was definitely following her, but she continued to ignore it. She didn’t have the space to think about it. What was one more oddity? Her friends needed help.
From the ruckus coming from outside it sounded like Will was not having much luck convincing everyone to go back inside. Piper glanced out and saw him shouting at them, and getting shouted at in return. Fuckface was just glaring out into the woods like they owed him money.
With her friends situated comfortably, Piper began to move onto the next little chunks of this general insanity that she could deal with. June had gone silent, sitting with Chloe’s head on her lap and staring at the wall.
Right, you’re no good to me then, Piper thought. The girl who had been hugging her knees and wailing had finally stopped though. Perfect. You’ll do.
Piper wandered over to her and lowered herself down to meet her face to face. “Hi!” she said brightly. “I’m Piper. I need you to help. Can you help me?”
The girl looked at her like she had two heads, but eventually something like resolve crept into her expression. She nodded.
“Great!” Piper stood up, then offered her a hand. “I’m a nurse, or, I’m training to be one, anyway. We’re going to move everyone who we can help over to the booths, okay? Can you help me do that?”
She saw that the girl read the subtext in her words. We’re going to move everyone who’s not dead. We’re going to fish around these dead bodies and pull out the live ones. But to her credit, she just gave her name as Sam and said that, yes, she could help.
The two of them spent the next fifteen minutes finding those still alive among the bodies scattered across the club. From about thirty bodies, they found eight that were still alive. Twenty two dead, Piper noted, a part of her brain absently noting that such a survival rate was atrocious and refusing to acknowledge it.
Sam refused to have anything to do with any of them until Piper had confirmed they were alive. Several of the dead had another of those strange little black crystals sitting on them or near them. Not all of them, but several. There was an obvious connection there, one which Piper picked at, but came to no conclusions for. Like the first, she pocketed them. She was unsure why. They were shiny; perhaps that was enough for her slightly kleptomaniac brain.
Not the dumbest thing I’ve stolen, she told herself by way of justification, then immediately thought of Marcus and his stolen wallet, and felt a flash of anxiety at the retribution she was sure he would level at her sooner or later. Probably sooner.
After all the unconscious patrons were situated as best as they could manage, Sam went outside to join the increasingly frustrated crowd that was still arguing with William. To her surprise, June slid out of her seat to join them.
Piper wanted none of it. She felt like she’d been going a million miles an hour since this whole shit storm kicked off and now her irrational, emotional side of her brain was telling her rational, logical side in no uncertain terms that she needed to sit down and chill out.
She wandered over to the bar and found the water tap installed on it was fucked. Great. She nipped around it, managed to find a chilled bottle hiding at the back of one of their fridges. One of the speaker stacks had toppled over in whatever the fuck had occurred and was blocking the door. With effort, she managed to drag it out of the way. There was another crystal sitting there, wedged into one of the holes in a rubber bar mat, previously trapped below the speaker. It was light grey, and seemed to be almost vibrating. She pocketed it, then fished the water bottle out of the fridge and went to sit with Kira and Chloe.
Finally still, she took a swig of cool water. She hadn’t realised how thirsty she’d gotten. Going to run out of this soon if the plumbing’s broken, the errant, distant voice of her subconscious informed her. It’s gonna be a problem.
She ignored it. She was focusing instead on the ball of light that had been following her around the bar.
What even the fuck are you? She thought at it. She’d decided it wasn’t threatening; it was too bougie to be threatening. All it did was bob along after her wherever she went like a lost puppy.
Maybe it's a fairy? There's fucking elves and magic glowing flowers now apparently. Why not fairies? Piper rolled her eyes internally. She’d never been a fairies and flowers and princesses kind of girl.
Still, a traitorous little part of her whispered, Would be kind of cool to have a fairy.
She squinted at it, trying to make out whether or not there was a tiny form in the middle of the golden light.
Come here, she thought to it, so as not to seem like a crazy person by speaking aloud. She chuckled quietly to herself. Least crazy thing around right now.
Piper flinched a little when the fairy floated closer to her. Before, it kind of bobbed around in her wake, sometimes a little closer, sometimes a little farther. Now, it had definitely come closer.
Now that it was closer she could see it much better. She felt a vague disappointment when she could not make out any tiny winged figure throwing out the light.
It was still very pretty. It was the rich yellow of true gold, lustrous and metallic and still somehow light. She reached out, suddenly overwhelmingly curious, and touched it. Her fingers went right through. Right. Well. Nothing to be done about that.
What the fuck is this? she thought, desperately railing against the situation. What the fuck is happening to us? I’d already have gone completely fucking nuts if everyone else wasn't also reacting to it. I’m still not sure I’m not.
Now that she’d stopped to think for a moment, her thoughts crashed over her in a torrent. Was this some sort of government experiment? But no, they couldn't have been keeping elves as an experiment and then unleashed them by somehow splicing terrain together en masse. Too outlandish. But then what other explanations are there? Magic? Was it crazy that that seemed like the simplest answer?
Piper took a few deep breaths, trying to steady herself, trying to bring that analytical side of her back to the fore. She half succeeded.
Magic, then. Makes as much sense as anything. I've got a magic fairy guide I guess, She side-eyed the golden light. Or a magic floating coloured ball thing at least.
She heard a disturbance outside. She leaned forward in her seat, just enough so that she could see out through the gaping hole where the front wall of the club used to be. Fuckface’s lackeys had come back, with more of his lackeys in tow. She could see them having a hurried conversation with him, their faces lit blue on one side by a nearby glowing mushroom. Piper didn’t like the look of the conversation they were having. Some instinct tickled at her gut.
She wriggled back in her seat, a sudden thought coming to mind. Kira had pepper spray. She grabbed her friend’s bag and fished around in its unfathomable depths until she felt what she was after. She pulled the mace out, and as she did, she noticed a glint of something in the purse. She pulled it out. It was a small gold rock, the exact colour of, well, gold. It was not stony, however, but crystalline, just like the others she had found.
She side-eyed her wisp again, noting the connection between the two in colour. Then she slipped it into her purse with the rest of the rocks. Building up quite a nice collection, she thought, the thief in her pleased at the little hoard she was amassing.
Would’ve made a good dragon, she thought. Still might, the way all this fucked up magic bullshit is going.
She was pulled from her thoughts by Fuckface approaching the crowd. William was utterly failing at keeping them under any kind of control, let alone getting them to move back into the bar. They were downright unruly, by this point.
“Right! This is the plan!” Fuckface shouted over everyone. The crowd fell quiet. “Everyone needs to stay here where it's niiice and safe. We're gonna try figure out what's going on.” Fuckface gestured magnanimously to himself and his handful of bouncers.
Piper watched the crowd. Most of them seemed grateful. Stupid fucks. He’s a creep! He’s a fucking lunatic! You can practically smell it on him. Why would you take anything he says as truth?
She wanted to scream, but she knew it would do her no good. Not everyone had as good a bullshit detector as Piper. Not even most people.
Just then, a plucky young man started yelling. “We need to find help! We need an ambulance! My friend is unconscious, and they’re not waking up! We need to go for help for all the people inside the bar. We need to all figure out what’s going on together. We need to keep everyone safe. We’re stronger together! You can’t leave us here!”
The man finished his impassioned, impromptu speech. People were nodding along with them, murmuring sounds of agreement. It made a lot of sense, after all. If you weren’t a power-hungry fuck, that is.
Fuckface walked up to the young man and stabbed him through the gut with the sword. The blade burst bloody from his back.
The crowd went quiet. The young man’s corpse slid from the blade and slumped to the grass. As one, the crowd began to edge away from the deranged man, back towards the bar.
“That's what I thought,” Marcus growled. “Now, shut the fuck up and get the fuck back inside!”
He no longer had any problems with compliance.