Body Count

Shane, after walking for so long that her legs burned in protest and her stomach grumbled feebly in want of food, decided that she'd underestimated the sheer magnitude of the city. Narrow alleys had the tendency to bend around a corner and morph into broad avenues. Skyscrapers burst from the concrete as suddenly as a spout of molten lava from a volcano's depths, obscured and hidden from view behind impossibly short buildings until the last moment. Nothing ever looked familiar, and yet they read several street signs more than once in passing.

Nonetheless, they were not lost.

As the hours wore on into complete darkness and a stillness that unnerved them all, the air that had pressed upon their bare necks and drawn forth small, sparkling beads of sweat earlier on now floated across their skin gently, cooling them and refreshing their dry and parched throats. They took this as a sign they were slowly but surely coming closer to the wide expanse of the ocean.

Shane, Stone, and Will were all greatly comforted by the fact - the prospect of wandering through town for a prolonged amount of time daunted them, and they shied away from it. Cliff, however, was distracted by his rapidly worsening illness. He coughed often between breaths, frequently having to stop altogether and lean against the nearest wall or car to regain his composure. In addition to that, he'd had to tear off part of his sleeve and have it pressed to his dripping nose constantly. While trying to reassure him that it was just a common cold and it would soon pass, Shane did her best not to inhale while she was near him. Becoming sick was not high on her to-do list.

Stars started winking into life as they traveled through the city. Despite having lived on this coast since she was less than four months old, Shane never would have guessed it to be this size before. She found it hard to comprehend that, for years, these buildings and vast expanses of warehousing districts had been perched just beyond the horizon of her neighborhood. Such distances were too enormous for her to hold in her mind.

Soon, however, relief began to fade into uncertainty, and then drifted into a familiar state of despair. The further they dragged their feet across the black top, the cooler the air became, but they seemed no closer to their goal than ten minutes before, or an hour, or five. The amount of people dwindled, and the stars continued flashing into existence far above their heads.

After walking for nearly a day after they left the club and confronted the French beggar for directions, Shane decided they should find a suitable place to stop and rest for the night. Just as she reached this conclusion, Stone voiced it.

"We should sleep," he said, his voice ragged and tired from disuse. "We'd get farther if we were more energized."

"I was just thinking that," Shane said wearily, beginning to turn her gaze back and forth as she searched for a safe place to sleep. "Did you have anywhere in mind?"

"Actually, yes," Stone replied, grinning. "See, over there? Just behind that outlet mall. It looks good enough."

Shane questioned his idea of 'good enough' when she spotted the building he was indicating. He was pointing at a small, squat one-story building crouched behind a silent shopping square. The four approached it, their footsteps silent and eager. Cliff broke into another fit of coughs, and Shane reached back to grab his arm and urge him on.

The front door to the place was shut, glass intact, but when Will tried the handle it proved unlocked. They filed in and looked around in the suddenly thick darkness.

"Nice choice," Will said, feeling his way around the walls and flicking a light switch up and down. It remained shady and sinister as ever. "By the looks of it, this pool hall hasn't been used since medieval times."

"Pool hall?" Shane said, interested. Her hand still gripping Cliff's shaking forearm, she stepped forward and her worn sneakers met thick and dusty carpet. Sure enough, as she moved further inside, her midriff collided gently with a table of middling height. She placed a hand on its' surface, feeling thin velvet under her fingers.

"I think we should move further in," she heard Stone say. "Look at the windows. Anybody could spot us through those."

It was true. The entire building was fronted by picture windows that, regardless of being grimy and stained with years of dust and dirt, were still clear enough to reveal the inside of the hall perfectly.

"All right," Shane said, pulling a hacking Cliff behind her as the four of them converged on the back of the hall. "Is that a door?"

She was having trouble making her way through the hall, bumping into tables and tripping over abandoned pool cues every few steps. Cliff, his coughs having subsided for the moment, dodged ahead of her and commenced pulling her through the mess. He sniffled.

The back room they all trudged into was a little more well lit than the previous room - a street lamp shone in from outside, but the window it streamed in through was small enough that if they placed themselves properly, nobody would see them from outside. A cluster of half a dozen more pool tables - all broken or marred in some way - was piled against the far wall.

"Under those, then," he said, sounding resigned to a horrible fate. "It's the safest we'll get."

Will and Cliff, both too exhausted to even nod their approval, traipsed over to their makeshift camp and collapsed underneath them. Will started snoring almost instantly, while Cliff sneezed once and fell silent.

Shane and Stone were still standing at the other end of the space, looking down at their companions. Shane noticed Stone's fingers twitching in a strange way, and asked him about it.

He grimaced, but a grin spread across his face all the same. "Before ... before this, I played guitar a lot. Every day. I guess my body still expects me to, even though ..." He trailed off, staring through a curtain of greasy hair at the dreary gray wall.

Shane observed him silently for a while before saying flatly, "You didn't want to stop."

He shook his head. "I don't like staying still. I'm used to being up all night, writing, doing whatever with friends. But I still figured sleep would be the best thing. Health is important when you don't have much to live on."

Shane leaned back against and wall and slowly slid down until she was sitting down. Another endless amount of time passed, during which Stone seated himself across from her on the opposite wall. Shane felt a trickle of guilt wend its' way down and around her spine, until her stomach and her heart were saturated in it.

"I'm sorry I stole you from your life," she said sincerely. "I know it's no excuse, but most of the time I don't know what's going on with this new personage I have to adopt. Murder was never something I wanted to partake in, but at the same time it's not something I think of as entirely wrong. Some people - not everybody, and not you, I know - deserve it. You don't, but I wasn't sure of who you were that night."

Stone stared at her during this little speech, his arms crossed loosely around his knees, his fingers still twitching spasmodically. For a long while after she finished, he continued to gaze at her. Finally, he sighed and lowered his eyes.

"You still don't know who I am, or what I do. What I did."

Shane was taken aback, but the truth in his words buried themselves in her brain. She considered. "No," she said slowly. "I don't. But I know that you're good."

Stone laughed quietly, glancing over at Cliff and Will before looking back at her. "You can't know that. Maybe what I do for you from day to day is an act to get myself out of here. You have to understand that, for us," he nodded at his two sleeping comrades, "Every moment of every day is devoted to escape. Even if we mean the things we say and do - helping you, comforting you, encouraging you - nothing is more important than our own personal freedom. We all want our lives back, no matter how we feel about the job at hand."

Shane looked at Cliff and Will, who were both breathing evenly, drugged with sleep. "Of course I know that," she said, a lump forming in her dry throat. "But you have to realize that, until I'm better positioned with power or stature, I can't do anything to help you other than protect you from the most minor of The Joker's abuses."

Stone nodded. "I know you're not that influential ... or, at least not as influential as the big man," He paused. "And I understand that, for now, there's nothing I can do to escape this. And, looking past the death threats and my morbid situation, I can always help you through your latest challenge."

Shane smiled gratefully.

Time passed sluggishly from then on, as the morning reluctantly flooded in through the small window in the wall. Only when Shanes' eyelids fluttered open did she realize she'd fallen asleep. By looking over at the opposite wall, she saw that Stone, too, had drifted off during the night. He was hunched over, his face obscured by his lank and greasy hair, snoring lightly.

Shane got shakily to her feet, yawned, and stretched luxuriously. A series of cracks resonated from her back as her joints readjusted themselves after long hours of immobility.

Cliff, she saw, was still curled up under a pool table, snoring a bit more obviously than Stone. Will, however, was just walking in the doorway when Shane stood.

"Good morning," he said cheerily. His eyes sparkled in a rejuvenated way she hadn't seen for a long time. "Did you sleep well?"

Slightly disturbed, as she always was, by the way his deep blue eyes pierced hers, she averted her gaze and said, "A lot better than I have been lately. And you?"

"Like a baby," Will said jovially. "Should we wake them up?" he asked, jerking his thumb at Stone and Cliff.

Loath though she was to pull them out of their restful slumber, Shane nodded. "We should get moving again. There are bound to be more people the later in the morning it is."

She bit her tongue, suppressing her true fears and the real reason she wanted to keep going. She was sure that, after discovering her absence the previous night, The Joker would have sent somebody out looking for her. How many people, she hadn't a clue, but there would be somebody. And she wanted to avoid them at all costs, at least until she was ready to go back.

So Will went over to Cliff and knelt by his side, shaking him gently but firmly awake. Shane did the same to Stone, who jumped and said blearily, "I'm ready."

The four of them didn't waste much time allowing themselves to wake up properly - in the light of day, the pool hall seemed bizarrely more menacing than in the dark of night.

The streets remained, temporarily, deserted. Their strides, longer and more purposeful than before, led them further towards the ocean as they day progressed.

And yet they didn't reach it that day, nor could they find an adequate place to sleep. And so they continued their begrudging march for another day and night after they left the club, their toes scraping across the ground and their necks bent downward.

Worse though, than their miserable trek towards the distant coast, was the fact that Stone started to sneeze incessantly.

Shane, wary of both Cliff and now Stone, darted ahead with Will on the pretense of checking for people or cars. The two of them kept away from the ailing ones, convinced that becoming sick would definitely bode ill for their journey.

On the second day, which dawned bright and cold, Shane granted herself the opportunity to become heartened once again. The temperature was dropping more rapidly than ever before, and a biting wind whipped their ragged and frayed clothes about their shivering frames. The clearest sign that they were nearing the ocean, though, was Shane's hand.

Her entire stay at the warehouse, plagued and riddled as it was by murder and mayhem, was also afflicted by the constant throbbing of her broken bones. The ridge along the back of her hand had always been searing when they were near the water - she noticed that whenever they took a trip into the city, it stopped, and it would start up again upon their return.

And now the ridge was pulsating gently, the skin around it glowing faintly red and growing warmer than the surrounding area. Her pace quickened.

The sun, which was still struggling over the far-away horizon, now broke over the hulking black forms that obscured it and blinded them. Shane shielded her eyes, but Will gasped and said excitedly, "Look!"

Shane lowered her hand and stared at where he was pointing. The massive shapes that had blocked the sun until now were revealed in its' brilliant white light to be two warehouses, less than a mile away. Seagulls cawed and circled over their heads.

Before Cliff, Stone, or Will could say another word, Shane was sprinting towards them, lungs burning, legs working harder than they ever had before.