Under layers of cloth bandages, his knuckles still ache and bleed, worn down to a raw fleshy pink-- all exposed nerve endings and scraped skin. There's caked blood on his Doc Martins. Not his. Beating a man to death bare-handed is messy business. They never seem to want to hold still. He always has to make it quick, nothing but punishing blows to the head (fractured skulls, split lips, broken cheek bones) and abdomen (ruptured spleens, torn diaphragms, splintered ribs). One hand over the mouth to stop the screaming while the other delivers cruel justice. Repeated blows. Over and over. Until they finally stop struggling
( ... )
Eli's too busy rattling off lists in his mind to notice anyone standing there. Need to buy milk, light bulb for the front hall, pretty sure I'm out of all deodorant, runs like a quiet ticker across the foreground of his mind and it's not until Brickett actually speaks, that Eli realizes that there are other things he needs to be paying attention to. When he sees who it is, he immediately stops and slips his way back up the last few steps, trying to reopen whatever distance remains between him and the vaguely familiar figure from the week before.
Innocently, Eli's hands go up and he shakes his head in way that silently says, I don't want trouble here. It's not a particularly heroic thing to do but Eli's not the hero here, Pallas is. He clears his throat in the proper way that only librarians seem capable of doing
( ... )
Those are the sort of things Brickett never thinks about. He hardly realizes there's no food in the cabinets until the hunger pangs hit and he notices he hasn't eaten for two, three days. The fridge is usually bare, except for half a carton of old milk and expired peanut butter. He only remembers to shower and cut his fingernails because the blood itches once it dries on him. Brickett-- the Rifter is a single-minded human being with little room for anything but vengeance and punishment in his head
( ... )
Eventually there comes a point in this game of retreat and advance when Eli runs out of steps and finds himself right where he started in front of the double-wide glass entrance of the library. He's unnerved -- which is saying something for a guy that runs around the city at night, playing at being an anonymous cape. Staring at Brickett through the haze of his quickly evaporating breath, Eli gets flickers here and there of the thoughts that skitter across the surface of the other man's mind. Blood and muffled noises and the pang of general malnutrition. Not enough sleep and chips of bone and gobbledygook mumbled wetly around broken teeth. Something, somewhere, about a sister. Shutting his eyes tightly and giving his head a sharp shake, he forces himself to look away, at something other that Brickett.
If he were a different person, Eli could just reach into Brickett's skull and jumble things around until they didn't make sense anymore, leaving the kid convinced whatever it was he thinks he knows was little more than an active
( ... )
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Innocently, Eli's hands go up and he shakes his head in way that silently says, I don't want trouble here. It's not a particularly heroic thing to do but Eli's not the hero here, Pallas is. He clears his throat in the proper way that only librarians seem capable of doing ( ... )
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If he were a different person, Eli could just reach into Brickett's skull and jumble things around until they didn't make sense anymore, leaving the kid convinced whatever it was he thinks he knows was little more than an active ( ... )
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