Journeying Through Quiet Places

[bluemanoncampus.livejournal.com]

Journeying Through Quiet Places (3/?)
Rating: PG for content, it may get "harder" later on
Summary: Hank was sucked into Locker 327 (or whatever) for a few days. It was much longer for him.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to veronicamars1 for betaing!

Part One Part Two

It was three nights later when Hank had the first nightmare.

It was, thankfully, not nearly as bad as the one Professor Dream had accidentally induced, but without the Professor’s presence to calm it, it lasted much longer. The wires and the bars. The needles and the knives. The shock and the burn and the cold and the pain and the fear and the rage. Especially the rage.

Hank woke drenched in cold sweat and found that he had ripped his makeshift bed to shreds and scattered his few belongings around the room. At dusk the day before, he had come across a mall and holed up in one of the department stores. Given the general looting and destruction the store had already suffered, he felt guilty for destroying even more during his rampage. The cheap clothes he wore were matted against his fur, which itself was tangling, so Hank stripped them off and laid them out to dry in the sun while he stopped shaking from the nightmare.

I thought that I was over this. I thought that I was over this! Oh, God, what am I going to do? Is this going to happen over and over again?

***********

Once both he and his clothes were dry again, Hank scavenged the rest of the mall.

Dust everywhere, tattered books written in a language he couldn’t read, the rancid smell of food that had rotted in the food court freezers... it was a lovely atmosphere for shopping.

The night before, Hank had noticed that the stores looked empty, but he was still surprised by the extent of the depletion and damage. It looked like some major disaster had befallen the entire area, but there had been just enough warning that the people had taken absolutely everything they could when they fled. Unfortunately, it also looked like a riot had broken out, since even the now-dead potted plants had been uprooted.

Hank spent the morning searching, but the only things he found worth taking were another set of clothes (in truly garish colors) and a camping backpack with a badly bent frame. He was able to straighten the frame enough so that the backpack was marginally usable and he filled it with his meager possessions. They rattled around in the pack with every step he took.

He also found a body. He almost hadn’t bothered with the pet shop, since all its cages were open and the tanks were smashed, but as he passed, he caught a whiff of decay over the general smell of mildew and mold. When he entered the store, he found the corpse lying facedown, halfway through the back door, surrounded by a thicker miasma of decay.

Hank, not wanting to disturb the body and thereby spread the stench, slowly moved out of the immediate area, sat back on his haunches and examined it from a distance. He tried to remember and properly analyze the decay patterns that Ms. Sidle had last been teaching.

Based on the dark, dank environment and the state of the body, I think that it’s been here at least nine months. It would take at least three for mold to eat away so much of the clothing and the fungus on the corpse itself has almost finished consuming all the flesh.

The remaining hair looks about shoulder-length and the clothes look like they had been sturdy, but I don’t know what the local fashion styles are. Were.

It looks like... he, I’ll say, like he slipped in a pool of water and cracked his head on the doorframe as he was leaving the back area. He looks undisturbed as well as empty-handed, so I guess that the store had been looted prior to his arrival.

Sighing, Hank slowly moved out of the store and finished gathering his things.

May you have an easy rest, for I cannot bury you.

Settling his pack more comfortably, he left the mall at midday and continued his trek.