Hobbstown Pt4
title Hobbstown
verse Honest-to-god Harsh Realm
rating R
summary Five years post canon, Tom Hobbes and Mike Pinocchio have a refugee camp and a real resistance settled in the anonymity of the American midlands. Their world and their cause have grown bigger than themselves, however, and has come to affect the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Two of those thousands cross paths in Hobbstown during the days leading up to one of the resistance’s greatest accomplishments. But even in the relative sanctuary of the camp, nothing is certain or permanent. Rated for cussing and bad decision making.

(Pt 1: little ripples) (Pt 2: day to day) (Pt 3: the particulars)

“You’re ridiculous,” Mary Anne told me later, suckling Gabriel by the wavering light of the fire, the last of her red wine split between two battered coffee cups. I was barefoot, soles of my feet close enough to the fire that it very nearly burnt. Gabriel’s pudgy little fingers were spread on the warm swell of her breast, contentedly kicking his feet. PInocchio, Hobbes, Nash, the shed...it all seemed like a nightmare. Very far away. At a campfire a few feet over a young woman was singing a song about love.

There were moments that I forgot that this world was hell.

“Oh whatever,” I grunted, crossing my hands behind my head, looking up at the clear night sky. “You only like him because he fucking chops wood for you without a shirt on.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t easy to please,” she said, sipping out of her mug and switching Gabe to the other side. “I’m just saying. You’re an idiot. Be easy on him for once.”

With a grunt, I pulled in close to the fire, a headache growing behind my eyes. “He thinks I’m his fucking kid brother or something. He was two words from telling me to eat my peas the other night. And don’t even get me started on Hobbes...”

She shook her head, brown hair glinting in what little light there was from the fire. “You’re an asshole, Zeek,” she murmured, all thinly veiled affection and wisdom. “And Tom Hobbes believes that everything is just a little bit better than it seems. He delivered him,” she said, nodding at Gabriel and she handed him off to me. “Found me in a crack house in the Cleveland encampment on one of their scouting mission, eight months pregnant, half starved. I tried to nick his wallet. Tried to stab Mike in the throat. And he took me, found me new shoes, and he put me in the back of their truck and brought me here.”

She shook her head, mouth a thin line. All the little horrors in all the little corners of the world. This place was full of people who’d left their own little slice of hell behind. Tom Hobbes was running purgatory, but it was better than burning down to ashes out in the rough.

“He believes in the goodness,” she murmured, watching me burp Gabe, grinning a little and handing over a wash cloth to wipe the spittle away. “And Nash is the same way. He gives a shit about you, idiot. Deal with it.”

Over the downy fuzz on Gabriel’s head, I glared at her, mouth opened to shoot something right back at her and the knowing tilt of her mouth. Opened, but never voiced, because at that moment the distant put-put-put of automatic weapon fire plummeted the camp into stunned, terrified silence. At fires around us, people sat frozen with spoons halfway to their mouth, faces turned back to the center of the camp. The mess hall, the lot for the Jeeps, and the shed, the small shed, where Nash and Tom and Pinocchio were waging war with a handful of genetic rejects and as much hope as they could scrape out of the world.

put-put-put-put-put

“What the fuck is going on?” someone shouted, springing to his feet a few campfires over and taking two nervous steps back. Tall man, skinny, stringy beard. Probably had been an addict four months ago, now he took turns doing dishes in the mess hall on Monday nights. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, loudest among the people that were already making scared noises, rustling, defenseless. Somewhere a child started to cry.

Distantly, there was shouting, a few voices, one loud and sure, another panicked. Someone was shouting for a medic. I was on my feet, didn’t quiet remember standing and somehow, impossibly, through all the intervening forest I heard someone say,

“Help! Someone help, I can’t find a pulse!”

*

I knew better. For years I had known better. No one goes running towards gun fire, not barefoot, not half drunk, not against your own best interests in the middle of the night. I knew better, but with camp teetering on the edge of chaos, muted shouts still coming from the middle of camp, it was hard to do anything else. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. They'd been gone five hours, maybe six, just that much out of a stint in that shed that should have lasted a week.

I wanted to know what was happening. Everyone likes a good car wreck, even with the whole world hemorrhaging out.

I wasn’t the first one there and I didn’t expect to be. A Jeep full of Marines that had on patrol were already gophering for PInocchio, running back and forth with thinly veiled panic as the second in command bellowed orders without missing a beat. Mike had a laceration above his right eye, and a fumbling young medic was trying to stop the flow of blood from the wound while his patient whipped around the clearing and shouted orders.

“Grant! Get Florence to the clinic, she needs IV fluids and something that’ll force her to rest for a week. Get Peters to help you carry her. Harrison, get your thumb out of your ass and make sure we didn’t leave the door open behind us, you follow me? Move, man, move! And for fuck’s sake Higgins, is this a fucking vacation? Do I look like your cruise director? Get your ass in gear and find any medic you can.”



“Sir,” a young man in olive uniform panted, running up to Mike. “It’s only the four of you that came back. We’re missing two others-”



“They’re dead, so see to the living. Nobody told you it was fun, rookie,” Mike said, barely looking at the recruit once his eyes landed on me. Me, slouched in the shadows, hands crossed over my chest. Not holding myself, not cringing. I’d seen whole cities razed to the ground. I’d seen what they do to survivors. Blood was just another part of living.

“Get out of here, kid,” he barked, any familiarity born of weeks of pissing him off evaporating in the midst of disaster. I was a fucking hobby, a luxury, a toy, and now that the big men were busy and fucked, there just wasn’t any time to pretend to give a shit about little old me. Story of my life. “Or lend us a fucking hand. This isn’t a spectator sport.”

I rolled my eyes, leaning stubbornly against the tree.

“Hobbes is dead, isn’t he?” I spat, tipping my head in the yellow light cast by the sodium flood lamps.

Mike pulled a face, looked at me like I was retarded, shit he’d scraped off his shoe.

“He’s fine,” he said, rolling his eyes, finally smacking the medic’s hand away and holding the bandage himself. There was a cluster of men by the shut shed door, crouched in a semi circle and talking intensely back and forth. Mike indicated them briefly with a nod of his head. In I caught a tuft of dirty, sweatslicked blond hair in the crowd. They were bent over something, maybe someone. I noticed a lot of gauze changing hands and, distantly, a familiar kind of groan. Something twisted and searingly hot pulled on my mesentery and I stumbled forward half a step.

“He’s looking after Nash,” Mike said, just as one of the medics stumbled away from the circle of people in time for Tom to roll Nash onto his side. Big strong Nash, grinning, earnest boy. He was dirty and sweaty now, covered in an unhealthy shine, and as I watched he spat thickly onto the cool soil of Hobbestown and slowly, politely vomited up blood.

And somehow, through the chaos and the smoke and all the frantic bodies, he saw me. I remember thinking that his eyes were very red. Lips cracked, smeared with blood, one arm pinned awkwardly beneath his side, the other clenched in Tom’s hand as if he was in a lot of pain. He saw me, and something seemed to relax in his face, find relief, and his lips mouth a word. It almost looked like he was praying.

....Zeek....

Suddenly, I couldn’t run fast enough. Barefoot and bleeding, but fuck, I’d come from cities where they steal your shoes for sport. Past the mess hall, past the flaps of fabric that had come to be home, past Mary Anne and her shouted question. Past the elementary school, the playground, the big bonfire where people sat around on weekend nights and sang songs about revolution and winning and love. Over a stream where Nash had pushed me into deep water just a few days ago. Finally to the outskirts, the parts of Hobbestown that hadn’t forgotten this wasn’t a ghetto anymore. The parts where the junkies started before Tom lit them on fire with misguided hope. It was a training ground, a bridge back to the world I’d come from, a bridge I’d hoped I’d burned.

“Hey,” the kid said, sitting outside his crappy tent, shivering a little. Tom had a no drugs policy, but Tom and his army were busy fighting an impossible world. Even parts of Hobbestown fell through the cracks.

“...f-fuck are you?” he managed, licking dry and cracked lips. The kid had a nervous, twitchy smile, and his eyes went from my feet to my crotch and not a lot higher. I’d run across him weeks ago, months ago by now, but he wouldn’t remember, not as juice up as he was. Mores the better. All I wanted was a light show in my skull.



“Doesn’t matter,” I said, pulse roaring in my ears. I hadn’t planned any of this, not even running. Years of instinct is hard to break. Running was as far as I got. Fight, flight, nine times out of ten running was enough. “You holding?”

“...depends...” he muttered, leering openly. His arms were an angry litany of purple and grey, collapsed veins making a grotesque city map on both forearms. He licked yellow teeth. “What you got to trade, little man?”

Old patterns, old rhythm, just another page out of an old, familiar life. Stupid to think I’d ever had a shot at something better. I scoffed at him, pathetic, but it was me that bent, ducking through his tent flap to the cramped squalor within. By the time he managed to get himself inside, I already had my shirt off, was working on my fly. Denim tossed over my shoulder, knees hitting the ground, and he wasn’t hard when I started, but he got there, fingers tugging at the nape of my neck, mad giggles drifting down. Bitter and salty and familiar. Too fucking familiar. In that thin, reedy voice he called me a slut when I chocked on his dick when it hit the back of my throat, he called me a whore when I pulled back as he came, cum dribbling down my chin. He grabbed my chin, forced me to look at him, runney eyes, bloodshot eyes and blown out pupils. He laughed. For a while he laughed, and I just knelt there and took it. I could almost taste the pills...

Stupid to think I deserved anything better. Like domestication had ever been for a fucked up gutter rat like me.

“Heard there was a....incident,” he said finally, padding half naked to a nearby garbage bag, rustling around jerkily. A scanner was crackling in a corner, bubbling out intercepted communications from Tom’s army. “Killed off a buncha....fucking...Par-par-particulars. Fucking...riddance.”

“Whatever,” I muttered, holding out my hand for the baggy. The man turned and stared at me, looking for a long time at my mouth. Another nervous giggle escaped him and he slapped the bag into my hand.

“Oh, I remember you. Your’e....fucking...with one’ve ‘em. You’re fucking...that...faggoty Particular. I remember you. Yeah...know ‘bout you.”

“Whatever, shit head,” I said, popping three tablets inside my cheek, body rejoicing at the almost immediate change. Maybe the chemicals didn’t work that fucking fast, but memory did. I knew what this felt like, and anticipation was almost as good as the high. I licked my own lips, bit them harshly, and let out a little groan. “You’ve got your fucking cokehead wires crossed."

Without warning, the guy smacked me, hard enough to leave a mark, make me stumble, spread all the fantastic lights across the front of my skull. Another desperate, needy sound bleed out of me, and I knew I had to get the fuck out of there before I fucked the dirtbag for the fun of it.

“Nah...you...playing whore to that...Particular. Wasshis name...it was on the radio...got hurt...”

I turned, not listening, just concentrating on the music ringing in my ears and halfway out the door ready to find a better use for the euphoria blooming in my veins. I almost didn’t hear him, almost got away, but he giggled one more time, triumphant, and called out to me. He was laughing. At the time, I wasn’t scared.


“Oh, yeah....I got it....Nash. The prize Particular. Scariest mother fucker of the whole fucked bunch.”