11: A_HOUSE_USURPED

Rainmaker had found her again, and when she woke, she'd been pulled back to their little hideout from before. He didn't want her to outrun him, it seemed. She wasn't entirely sure how that happened, just that it had, and that she had to deal with it. Her stomach hurt less, though. Whether Rainmaker had eaten from the tree or not, he didn't seem quite so lacking in energy. Though they were both far more sick.

They both bore pale faces and sunken eyes. Hair like straw and teeth so yellow they must have been made entirely of their own plaque.

Adelaide didn't speak of the tree, or her excursion. Neither did he. The both of them were content to be quiet about it forever, it seemed. Adelaide's hands were scratched, and it had become harder to ball up a fist or pick up items. Things slipped from her fingers– mostly unimportant things now. There wasn't much worth holding onto in the wastes. Rainmaker had tied her briefcase around one hand, by looping some discarded cloth around the handle, and tied her cross necklace around the other.

In turn, when Rainmaker had to stop between steps to heave, she held his hair out of his face, and pulled him along no matter how delirious he became. It was a mutual benefit, most certainly. Even if somewhat humiliating for the both of them. To be so utterly folded by their sickness in this horrid world, reliant on each other, was a rather unenviable position.

As they walked, Rainmaker seemingly couldn't stop himself from asking about Jisako. "What was she like? Would she want you to die here? Was she vengeful? Was she religious?" And Adelaide felt more strongly than ever the hairless part of the equation she'd previously put together about him. Because, there was nothing like radiation poisoning that worked to remind her that though he was a child, Rainmaker was still a grown man. And an annoying one. An ass that annoyed her.

She'd become short with him and snapped at him. "She's dead! Unless you plan to defile her corpse, I don't see what's so interesting about her!"

So he had retreated into himself and had not asked anything about Jisako again. Adelaide had felt some satisfaction in the moment, though the silence eventually began to drive her mad again. She basked in her victory, at first, but then she went realizing too late she still hadn't changed. "I'm too snappy," she admitted.

"You yelled. But I was being pokey," he replied. "So it's even."

"...If you really want to know about her life, you'll have to tell me about yours," Adelaide noted. "Equal exchange."

"It's very fair," Rainmaker nodded, volunteering absolutely no information.

"So you plan to do it?"

He shook his head. "Not right now. With how bad my head hurts, I'd probably just start crying. And well, you know."

"And boys don't cry?" Adelaide quirked a brow. Almost a bit teasing. Forrest had been that way about things.

"We do. But not in front of strange women."

She at least found that answer unique enough to be amusing, in its own childish way. Not perhaps the most investing answer, of course, but she appreciated what it was.

"Think of me as a replacement mother," Adelaide joked.

Rainmaker snorted, making a face of clear disgust in regards to the idea. Though he didn't get to comment on it, because he was soon once again double over, attempting to empty stomach. Unfortunately for him, there was nothing inside that stomach, so the only thing he could do was be in rather horrible pain. All that escaped him was bile. The smell permeating the air, creating yet another foul odour to be endured.

Adelaide couldn't decide if that was because he hadn't been eating much, or because he'd thrown up just about everything else that was in his system. Either way, she was the one holding his hair back– not that either of them were clean enough for that to be noteworthy. By this point, it was just a formality she was doing for the sake of making him feel a little better. As good as he could feel while losing the entirety of his stomach contents to the ground below.

Both of them had transformed into absolutely wretched looking dirt mounds. Nobody was brushing their hair on a suicide mission, so they were both looking more like matted dogs than people on the heads. Rainmaker's hair moved only into clumps and Adelaide could barely put her fingers through it. Hers wasn't exactly much better but she would've considered it just a bit neater– if only because her hair having been held in its specific ponytail was a little more structured than his. It could be cordoned off into two distinct sections, having yet to form into a singular mass.

It was a dumb thing to worry about on a suicide mission, but she was still thinking about it. Because that was just how people were. And this was a boring suicide mission, so the mind was prone to wandering itself off into strange corners and interests and abysses.

Although, it wasn't too long after that they found a physical abyss. A bunker door, which had been shut tight, though had no padlock or any sort of protection from someone looking to open the thing. Adelaide and Rainmaker worked to peel it open. The door was absurdly stubborn, and they were both much weaker than the average person by this point. If they were having a good day now, it meant being an average person. The bunker door finally gave way, and then came the tough business of deciding who had to go first into the pit.

It was common knowledge that even among the death seekers of the world, it was quite hard to find people who'd be awful willing to walk into a dark hole with no idea what was down it. Of course, they had the vaguest, roughest, most general explanation they could think but it was not anything they could confirm. There could've been people down there, there could've been only ghosts. There could've been a family's food reserves, or nothing at all. The corpse of a child who'd made it down but didn't have any can opener and had starved, or some old dog gone mad.

So they looked between each other and kept putting off the issue, before Adelaide opted to point out how her hands were bound and she and the briefcase would fall several feet if she was to go down, which would doubtless make him have to go down anyway. That logic swayed Rainmaker enough to make him go down first, and eventually he managed to sway Adelaide to simply come down herself to see how lacking the fuss was down there.

It was a bunker. Fully stocked, fully unused. Likely, whoever had stocked it hadn't had enough time or enough warning to get into it. Either way, it was unlikely whoever it belonged to was going to get to it, so the place was theirs until further notice.

#

The bunker wasn't very large, and it smelled vaguely of mildew. The walls were covered in a gaudy flower wallpaper, which seemed to be trying it's best to say "don't think too hard about how fucked everything is, isn't this just like home?", even when it wasn't a thing like a home. There were two doors. When you pulled on one, it revealed something which almost resembled a bathroom. The other one opened to a room with all the cans.

Adelaide almost felt like she was once again with Anane, scooping food out from cans and attempting to get comfortable on a seat that was, unlike in his house, lacking in illusionary magic to make the experience any more comfortable. The seat was meant to be some sort of couch– though Adelaide had to wonder who in the world would've brought a single couch, with no pull out function, and no bed inside at all.

Rainmaker had seated himself on the floor at one point. He had pawed the ground and walls, feeling around like a cat. He kept wriggling for a bit, before just laying down on the floor. He laid on his stomach, like a cat tempting you to pet it, which would scratch you if you dare actually try. Though, she reasoned that the cat's seductions could only work if its face wasn't still purple with bruising. She didn't know what possessed her to say it, but she at some point stared at him and commented, "You look like someone who's got those sort of marks on his face awful often." It was a dry observation.

Rainmaker didn't seem to put too much thought to it either. "I'm not," was the equally dry response he gave. "But you just like poking for wounds. And I guess I'm someone who can wear any wounds."

"I suppose I might."

Rainmaker only sighed at her. He rolled onto his side and looked at the briefcase propped against the side of the couch thing.

"What's the case for? You've been lugging it everywhere but you never open it."

"It's got radios inside it. Your favourite subject."

"Radios?"

"Sort of. It's a transmission relay. Goes all the way to one of the orbitals."

"You have a direct line to the orbitals?" Rainmaker wondered, in utter disbelief. "What kind of nonsense is that? You've never used it in front of me."

"...It broke," Adelaide answered. "I've been trying to fix it but all my attempts only caused more problems. Now I'm just lugging it around and hoping something happens. The man I was using it to talk to got quite mad with me. And the signal delay was going to drive us both mad anyway," Adelaide replied. She put her leg in front of the briefcase, just in case Rainmaker tried to paw at it. Even if she knew logically that Forrest would never want to speak to her again, she also knew that the both of them were not logical beings and she wanted to be hopeful. So the briefcase had become precious to her. Hope. Whatever kind of hope there was for a woman like her in the end of the world. Whatever that word, or the vague concept it stood in for actually meant.

"So you've just been holding onto it for some time, then? For the sake of it?"

"For hope's sake," she said. "You know hope?"

"Not very closely," Rainmaker answered, and he rolled away, turning his gaze toward the ill-picked flower pattern, and the edges of the paper which were peeling their way off. "...I can fix the relay for you. If you need it. I can play around with a lot of these sorts of things… I know them pretty well, even if you've modified it. Lots of small parts don't bother me, since I'm used to working with them."

"I'd… be deeply thankful if you'd be so kind," she answered, eyes shining. She stared. She hadn't expected it at all.

"Give it over, I'll take a look at it," he said. "No tools on hand so I can't promise it'll be high quality when I'm done with it. But I'll make sure I can get the thing working."

Adelaide hesitated, before pushing the briefcase toward him.

Rainmaker examined the briefcase, deftly probing its exterior with his fingers. He fretted for a moment or two, taking in a feel for the casing, before delicately prying it open. Inside, a jumble of wires and circuitry greeted the both of them, a tangled mess that seemed to mock any attempts at understanding its complexity. "Hmph. You made a real mess of this," Rainmaker declared. "No wonder nothing fit right… Some of these aren't even in the right– what in the world? Oh dear. This is going to take a while."

"Sorry," Adelaide replied. "I was so desperate to fix it. I don't know what I messed up."

"I can tell for sure you didn't know what you were doing," Rainmaker declared. "There's so much– at least none of the parts are totally broken. Just out of place." His fingers glided between the pieces, and the tangled wires flowed around his hand and unravelled like water in a stream, as though they had never been tangled in on themselves at all.

Rainmaker's movements were methodical. Each adjustment so precise and slight that it seemed almost like he hadn't moved at all. The chaos of the world's end seemed to all melt away as Rainmaker worked. The time passed them by in a dead silence, broken only by the occasional grunt of frustration as Rainmaker made progress. When he was done, Rainmaker passed it back to her with only a grunt. He didn't acknowledge it when she thanked him, nor did he comment about the process of building it.

So, once again, they fell into silence for a period.

Rainmaker spoke again only after a great deal of time had passed. "Do you actually know hope?"

"Of course I do, everyone knows hope. Everyone's got their miseries, and everyone's got their passions, and life's somewhere in between. You have your passion for radios, and you've got the miseries of being in this place, and being miserable enough to want to walk in it and die in it instead of live."

"I wasn't going to live anyway," Rainmaker replied.

Adelaide looked at him again, almost hesitantly now. The cat wasn't facing her. Part of her debated if there'd be any merit to asking. The crueller part of her sensibilities won out, and she was soon asking outright. "Do you plan to take my deal?" she asked.

"I think I might. I've been thinking about it. But how can I know you'll keep your end of the deal?" The cat still did not face her, instead focusing on what must have been a spot possessed by a ghost. Adelaide pulled the cross off her neck, and moved to reach for the corner, to check for what he was looking at, only to catch herself. She yanked her hand back. A wash of anger came over her.

"Don't be stupid, boy. There's no one around but you, and I go mad from loneliness easily. It won't matter a thing. I'll hold my word the way I always do– and whether that means anything to you or not, it'll depend on how much you trust me." She forced her hand down to her side, putting the cross right back where it belonged.

"Not much," he answered.

"Then it'll be a game not worth very much," she replied. Rainmaker sighed, audibly. Adelaide smiled, though it wasn't particularly joyous. "Impatient?" she asked.

"I'm not in any state to be impatient," he replied. "Neither of us are."

Adelaide could've sworn she saw Jisako lying next to him when he said that, but the apparition was gone sure as sight and she was left staring at an empty patch of bunker floor, next to Rainmaker. Not that he noticed, he wasn't looking at her. She shook her head. "Good, right," she said. "You can ask the first question, if it'd steel your nerves."

Rainmaker forced in a breath. "Why are you on Earth?" he asked, point blank. The air must've changed without her realizing it, because Rainmaker had sat up straight as a stalk and was looking at her with his eyes pulled into a focus. He was no longer the semi-familiar hairless cat. Now he was just a man, with a bit of a mean face, dirty hair, and who could've used a shave.

"Repentance," Adelaide answered, after a moment of thought. "That is what I live for. Repenting for a sin I made."

"You've sinned? Can't imagine it."

"Oh, shut it." Adelaide paused for a moment. "Jisako, you know, she's dead. Very dead. And she was murdered. Very brutally." Adelaide traced her hand over her arm. "For that crime I did, I should be rotting in a bombed out jail cell. These wrists should be marked with handcuffs. It was my fault she was murdered."

"Well, it's not as though you killed her," he said.

"But it's not so different as to if I had, is it? I drove her away from me and then her death was inevitable. I should have kept her with me. I should have treated her as the queen of my wretched existence. I did not. I attempted to pull her down to the same level as me."

"It's just strange to have someone be so overtly invested in my wife's life," Adelaide noted. "You never knew her, and yet you just keep asking about her." Her tone became a bit sharper than she'd initially intended. "It's strange to me. It's not how people act."

"I got my face turned to mash by her sister– of course I'm curious about her," Rainmaker replied. "It's like she's lingering over everyone around me but I can't figure out why anyone was so invested in her in the first place. She's this mystery that's just hanging over– this dark cloud– and I'm trying to figure it out. Her wife's on the ground, her sister is too. She was murdered because she got pregnant when she ran off with Maury– she sounds like she was just a woman but none of you stop talking about her. Everyone keeps talking about her and I can't run from hearing a single thing about this woman who doesn't even sound real." He breathed out in a huff, as though frustrated by the saturation of stories about Jisako filling his life. Adelaide could only find it bizarre.

Adelaide sighed. "It's a sorrow of life. If you'd met her, you'd understand her endless glory."

"I wonder. Or would I just have thought you were still a loon?"

"Maybe it'd be both."

"Right, well I've told you why I'm here. You tell me now," Adelaide replied. She attempted to prop head up on her arm, but it didn't do anything. Her arm wasn't strong enough, and trembled violently, so she gave up on it, bringing her hand down. She put her head back against the sofa. Her neck hurt– maybe from having to hold the weight of her head at so many strange angles as she crawled around or attempted to peer around places at strange angles.

Rainmaker put his hand over his eyes. "I did a bad thing. I did a very bad thing, and now, I'm trying to atone."

"What did you do?"

"I stood by." Though he refused to divulge more than that. Adelaide decided to step off.

Adelaide exhaled slowly, her gaze drifting to the peeling wallpaper. She felt a surge of exhaustion wash over her. Weariness seeped into the very core of her being, tangling itself with her bones. Perhaps it was the weight of the maggots, in a breeding frenzy, making her blood too thick and heavy. It would've made as much sense as anything else.

Once a silence had solidified, she decided to attempt to contact Forrest again with the newly fixed radio. It only seemed sensical to try to use it when it had been 'fixed.' Despite that, there was still not a word over the relay, but by this point she was just doing it for the sake of doing it. Rainmaker watched her lazily as he went between laying on the ground and eating and generally attempting to recoup. She didn't pay enough mind to him to have noticed he'd found a gun of some sort and she had no idea where it came from, on account of not having been paying attention to him.

"Adelaide?" he called.

"Not right now, Rainmaker," she said, swatting him away. "Trying to figure something out."

"But I already fixed it, right?"

"Yeah, and now I'm using it!" she snapped at Rainmaker.

"But Adelaide–"

"Not right now."

He poked her in the face with the barrel of the gun– and that was the only thing that finally got her attention. Adelaide jolted away, shocked. "What the hell? Why would you do that?"

"You weren't paying attention," Rainmaker whined at her. Adelaide wanted to wrangle his neck for pointing the gun at her, but brought her hands down. It would have been too much to attack him. It would have driven him away instantly. The maggots must have been growing so utterly wild inside of her. She felt her stomach clogging up with them. Her lungs and heart were also filling. Her heart, already prepared to blow, somehow managed to hold together when there shouldn't have been any reason it could.

Adelaide clenched her teeth. "What are you, twelve? And where the hell did you get that thing?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell you about."

"Well put that fucking thing down!" she shouted.

Rainmaker flinched away from her. Adelaide didn't feel so guilty about it this time.

Rainmaker lowered the gun, placing it on the ground between them, before standing back up. Adelaide quirked a brow once she realized how nervous he seemed just looking at it. He clearly wasn't someone who spent a lot of time around firearms or trying to handle them. She had assumed he was too brave with them, since he'd pointed it at her. Adelaide wasn't entirely familiar around arms like the one in front of them either, but she looked down at it with much less discomfort.

She recalled a memory stained in her beloved bride's blood as she looked at the gun.

Jisako had apparently been shot in the back. According to the police, her head was taken off to hide her identity rather than as the method of murder. She'd been shot from not too far away. Maybe she'd had time to run. Maybe she'd trusted until the end. Maybe she'd known what was coming and didn't bother running. Adelaide wouldn't have been surprised in that case. It was always too much for Jisako. Living in a cold world seemingly intent on making her feel pain. A cult for a family, a horrible wife in Adelaide, and finally, a killing blow from a boyfriend she'd made the mistake of thinking could be a second love for her. Adelaide could imagine her standing still, and only quietly apologizing for being a burden on Maury.

Then, even after the apology, she was still shot in the back and decapitated. Not that it had mattered. The scars which littered it were so utterly distinct that it was easy to identify her, even before the head was found wrapped in layers upon layers of garbage bags.

They had posted photos of the woman's body in newspapers– censored only in the barest of ways, because of course, covering any unpleasant genitalia or nipples must have been of utmost importance when displaying images of a woman's headless dead body. There was almost a sick comedy to it, when Adelaide thought of what the priorities were.

The story of such a salacious murder had spread rather quickly through low rate magazines, especially with such convenient shock imagery to share. The story of a pregnant woman, murdered by her boyfriend, and then decapitated– well, there were many vultures which had been rather eager to share the story around. Some pretended to hold compassion, speaking of Jisako as though she were an old friend, while giddily using her death for a profit.

Adelaide had recognized the scars instantly when she first saw them, printed in black and white, placed on the second page of the newspaper. The only new ones in the photo were the bullet wounds in Jisako's back. Adelaide had stared at those bullet wounds. Horrible new marks on a patchwork body she was so familiar with.

She had felt anger. Disgust. A whole host of things of course. But Adelaide still had no fear of the weapon itself. Jisako's death was Adelaide's own fault, not the gun. The gun was only the implement of murder, the killer only the hand that squeezed. Adelaide had been the one to push her into the arms of an evil man. Adelaide had been the one to convince her that leaving it all behind was some brilliant idea. Adelaide. Adelaide. Adelaide.

It was a stupid mindset. But she just had no interest in the real reasons for Jisako's death. She just wanted to crucify herself.

Any excuse, any ideology, any reason would do. So long as she could take herself for an evil doer and decide she wasn't worth a damn thing in the world, then it would all be worth it. Because it was more pleasant to blame herself. If she blamed herself, she could linger on it forever. She'd never have to move on. She could always come back to the same pain and same regrets.

It was a selfish method of mourning, wasn't it?

Either way, she considered Rainmaker a coward for the fact he feared it at all. It wasn't like someone was pointing it at him, though she was certainly tempted to do so, as revenge for how he'd acted before.

Adelaide leaned down and attempted to pick it up, struggling to bring it into her hands and to hold onto it. Her fingers struggled to curl, and the object kept slipping out of her feeble grip. She put in as much force as she could muster for her rapidly weakening fingers. The gun didn't feel right in her hand– it was too heavy, and it was yet also too small. It felt like it wasn't going to be particularly powerful even if she wanted it to be.

Rainmaker watched her. "You know how to use one of those?"

"No, but it can't be that bad," Adelaide responded. "It's just a gun, isn't it? Everyone's seen one of these things, I'm sure. Aim and pull the trigger," Adelaide assured him, though she wasn't actually certain in the slightest. It was really only bravado. "Where'd you find it?"

"It was behind a lot of the food cans and water. I noticed something shining kind of off, so… Look and find, I guess." Rainmaker stared at the gun, held between Adelaide's hands. "Kind of depressing to think about why they'd have brought it here."

Adelaide took a second to realize what he was implying. She then found it odd to assume that would be the only reason to bring it inside. She sighed. His idea was probably the most accurate. "Who knows. Maybe it could've been a way to kill an unwanted intruder, or to fight boredom by shooting rats," she joked, in a vain attempt to lighten the dire mood they'd accidentally created for themselves once again.

"We ought to shoot each other then," he joked. She wasn't too sure whether that was a joke.

"Ladies first," Adelaide responded, attempting to point the gun at him as impulse overtook her mind, before thinking better of it. She brought it down quickly as the realization of what she could have done hit. She at least knew that much– to not point it at him in the event it might go off and she'd be down a companion again. She lamely gave it a minor lift before bringing it back down, and deciding that she was better off just leaving it on the ground because her hands couldn't hold it. They'd gotten a bit better, having had some rest, but still. They wouldn't be better for at least a little while, and she was going to have to deal with that.

"Hey, do you think it's odd we've still not been affected by the radiation?" Rainmaker suddenly asked.

Adelaide raised a brow. "Do you think radiation is all three eyed fish and melting faces?"

Rainmaker shook his head. "No, no, I know better than to think that's what mutation's like. But– we've been walking through this radiated landscape the entire time and we still haven't died yet." He looked up at the sky, as though some greater creator would part the clouds to explain its choice to allow them to live so long to him.

"Maybe it's your god protecting us," Adelaide replied, dryly. "Radiation poisoning– first come symptoms. Survive the symptoms and you can survive until the cancer comes."

"I know, I know. But haven't we been having awfully long latency periods here?"

"I don't think so," Adelaide replied. "It's just long enough to get where we're going."

"It really must be god given then," Rainmaker declared.

Adelaide huffed, and refused to answer, continuing on without looking back at him.