In the Eyes of a Child - part 3
Brahams wasn’t far, but it took longer than Cybil had expected due to the mist. She didn’t encounter any more creatures once she’d left Silent Hill, for which she was eternally grateful, but neither was there any traffic.
And Brahams was a ghost town.
Cybil parked her bike outside the small police station, just staring up at the abandoned building for several moments before slowly sinking down on the ground, burying her face in her hands. Rose had somehow managed to make sense of all this and go on anyway. Cybil couldn’t. This was to be her safe haven, where she could get help and be rational again, but instead it turned out to be exactly the same as Silent Hill.
“Oh fuck… what the fuck…” She rocked back and forth, curling up around herself. They’re all gone. There is nothing left.
Some time passed, the only sound coming from the flapping of a small flag hanging from the wall further down the street. Cybil eventually lay down on her side, shaking hard as she tried to drown out her surroundings.
At some point, she must have fallen asleep, because the hoarse calls from crows overhead slowly brought her to awareness. She sat up, feeling less torn apart but just as lonely and afraid. Fucked up. She wiped at her face, whimpering quietly as she got up on her feet.
The car wasn’t there. Rose must have taken it somewhere, or perhaps the lunatics took her somewhere in it.
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, impatiently wiping at her eyes again. Decisively, she started to walk down the street towards her small apartment. She wondered what it would look like in this cold world.
As it turned out, she would never find out. The road ended not far from the police station, cut off by a deep gorge that also went right through the surrounding buildings, mist creeping over the ragged edges. Cybil shuddered at the sight, just staring into the whiteness for a moment and feeling herself almost break again, but then she turned and ran back the way she came, turning down Marshall Street just to find a similar sight there.
Half an hour later, she was leaning against her parked bike, panting from running. Brahams only existed a few hundred yards off the main road. Her hometown, or what looked a lot like it, was cut short in all directions. Her mother’s house had been severed in half. Cybil had strained to try and see the other side she knew had to be beyond the mist; perhaps a rock jutting out of the whiteness, or the contours of a road on the other side of the gorge, but it was simply… gone.
She pushed herself away from the bike and went into the abandoned police station. The two computers she tried to boot worked still, but the screens flickered so much that she couldn’t use them. Not knowing much about computers anyway, Cybil tried the phones, all of them. Static noise distorted the ring tone.
The academy never prepared us for this.
Not knowing what else to do, Cybil simply reloaded her gun, ‘borrowed’ some gear from a fellow police officer who’d left his locker open, and left the police station. By now she was hungry. There was no way to judge the time of day; she had acquired a digital watch, but it said 4 am. Nothing works.
At the gas station, Cybil filled the tank of her bike and got herself a tuna sandwich, leaving some money on the counter. Reinforcements or no reinforcements, she was going to find Rose’s car.
--
In truth, it wasn’t hard to find the right road; all roads but one would always end in nothing. The first time it happened, Cybil barely managed to brake in time, falling off her battered bike and sending it spinning towards the railing while she rolled on the ground, putting some fresh scratches on Johnson’s helmet and on herself. Sometimes, she would stand on the edge of one such dead end among the ever falling ashes, looking down and remembering when this nightmare began and wishing she could find the courage to just jump - but no. She had sworn to protect and serve, and that was what she would do, as long as there was someone left out there to protect. She prayed that there was. If there ever was a right time to turn religious, now would be pretty high on the list, but she still couldn’t quite manage it.
A day passed, or at least the dates on Cybil’s digital watch changed from July the second to July the third. It had been June the 21th the night she followed Rose into Silent Hill. The date function was probably broken as well.
She refueled at a gas station along the road, looking for people, but all she saw was black crows, flying in great flocks or perching in the trees along the road. She soon started to regret that she hadn’t taken the crazy lady with her, fearing she was growing just as crazy herself. Even Dahlia would have been a comfort in this grey world.
She slept on a couch at a roadside inn, plagued by nightmares. As she followed the road north into Pennsylvania, ashes stuck to her clothes and skin. No use washing it off.
Rose. She was out there somewhere with her child.
Taking a break to eat another tuna sandwich, Cybil found herself staring at a big sign next to the road, painted to look like an open book.
”Do you not know that we will judge angels? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?” Cybil smiled crookedly as she read the words aloud, removing her helmet for a moment. Not until now, she noted that she was limping slightly - probably from the fall the day before. “I would have preferred a livelier hell.” She had meant to sound sarcastic, but her hoarse voice just sounded tired in her own ears as she straddled the bike again.
Steering away from another gorge several hours later, Cybil found herself on a much smaller road, and she slowed her bike. The people in this area must be pretty rich, judging by the flashy architecture of the houses she passed, partly shrouded in mist.
And then there it was. Rose’s car, parked neatly outside one of the last houses on the road.