Watchmen fic: Last Days of an Unreal City, chapter 4 - Cost-exchange
Title: Last Days of an Unreal City - Chapter 4 - Cost-exchange
Characters: Rorschach/Nite Owl II
Rating: PG-13
Word count (this section): 6231
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
Summary: AU. The Cold War reaches its ultimate conclusion, and Rorschach and Daniel are among the survivors when the East Coast is attacked.
Chapter Index.
===
It finally rained during the flight to the hospital: huge, fat black drops that left greasy smears on Archie's windows. Daniel thought of tadpoles falling from the sky, and there was a very unpleasant moment where he felt as if Rorschach was reading his mind, because Rorschach said, "A plague of frogs."
Daniel wondered if being creepy came easily to Rorschach, or if it was something that he'd had to work at.
The poor weather just made the visibility even worse. If it had not been for the rather unusual nature of their situation, then Daniel would not have attempted the flight. The VOR and DME stations weren't 'speaking' to him, there were no lights or landmarks visible from the air - not even Manhattan's skyscrapers were visible through the clouds below - and his only aid was the owlship's inertial navigation system. Instrument flying had always been his forte, but that felt like rather a small consolation in light of the present circumstances. He caught himself drumming his index finger against the control stick, and hoped that no-one else had noticed the nervous gesture.
If the passengers had picked up on his unease, then they did not obviously show it. For the most part, the cabin was silent - there were few distractions from the static and chatter in Daniel's radio headset, and he was immensely glad when people occasionally spoke, even if they did say things like:
"Weren't you the guy who was involved in the Iran hostage thing?" Answer: No, that was the Comedian.
"Is this thing safe?" Answer: Yes. (Asshole.)
"What do you think of Rorschach?" Answer: No comment.
"Were you in 'Nam?" Answer: No, that was also the Comedian.
"Why do you think you masks were all a bunch of white guys?" Answer: I, er... (Thus followed a small debate as to whether Rorschach was white or not. Rorschach remained studiously uninterested throughout. One of the passengers also felt the need to point out that, technically speaking, Doc Manhattan was blue.)
"Do you know Adrian Veidt?" Answer: Yes.
"What's Adrian Veidt like?" Answer: He's a nice guy.
"Is Adrian Veidt gay?" Answer: What he does in private is his own business.
"Have you ever been shot?" Answer: Yes.
"What's it like?" Answer: It hurts a lot.
Even in the face of disaster, people never really stopped being people. That was their blessing and that was their curse.
Every so often, Daniel glanced over to Rorschach, just to check that he was okay. Rorschach was leaning against the inside of the hull, still standing, with his eyes closed. Daniel would have thought that he was asleep on his feet, if it wasn't for the way that Rorschach's grip tightened whenever the fire axe threatened to slip out of his hand.
"Hey," Daniel said quietly, and reached out to give Rorschach a gentle nudge.
Rorschach's eyes blinked into focus.
"You alright?" Daniel asked, and thought, I bet he's going to say that he's fine, and that he's just resting his eyes or something.
"Just resting my eyes," said Rorschach.
Ha.
"Don't make yourself sick or anything," Daniel said, and felt his heart sink slightly at the pleading note in his own voice. You could no more negotiate with Rorschach than you could negotiate with the weather.
Rorschach didn't even bother to offer a token 'I'm fine,' in way of reply. He just grunted, as if ill health was solely the province of the weak and stupid, and Daniel felt a conflicting desire to both smile and punch him, quite possibly at the same time.
Many years ago, Daniel had once invested time and effort in trying to keep Rorschach alive and on the right side of the law; ultimately, it had been about as productive as banging his head against a wall. Rorschach had viewed his concern as condescending and intrusive - and, in retrospect, Daniel supposed that his younger self had been a bit like one of those foolish, well-meaning women who attached themselves to 'troubled' men and tried to 'help' them. But I can change him, ma, really I can. There was no changing Rorschach. The best you could do was co-exist with him, and keep a wide berth when he occasionally did things to piss off the police.
(Like murder people.)
Daniel really wished that Rorschach would put the fire axe down.
"If you collapse from exhaustion, I'm going to leave you where you drop," Daniel muttered, safe in the knowledge that neither of them believed it.
Once they were over Harlem, the rain began to lessen to a half-hearted drizzle, and the visibility was slightly better. Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center was a handful of miles ahead, slotted somewhere in the neat grey grid of New York's streets; the map told Daniel that it was in Washington Heights, very close to the bank of the Hudson. He could almost make out the outline of Washington Bridge in the distance.
From what little he could see, all of the buildings still seemed to be intact. He wondered how lower Manhattan had fared.
Daniel cleared his throat. "Guys, I'm going to take the owlship down a short distance away from the medical center. If there are any cops in the area, then I don't have the time or energy to be butting heads with them, and I imagine that the feeling is mutual. Er... It'd be appreciated if you didn't mention me (us, he silently amended in his mind) to the authorities."
His words were met with a murmur of assent. If the people had any ethical qualms about the fact that they were riding around in an illegal aircraft that violated a whole mess of of airspace regulations, they weren't about to complain. Hell, it was likely that they were blissfully unaware of the number of laws that Archie broke simply by existing. The Federal Aviation Authority were probably the only people who had come to hate Nite Owl as much as the NYPD did.
Daniel set them down somewhere on the Henry Hudson Parkway, confirmed that the people were okay to walk from there, and gave them directions. They thanked him, awkwardly, as politely as they could. Pain and exhaustion had filled their heads with white noise, and Daniel had a small insight in to how they felt - it was as if the endless smog had somehow managed to get under their skin, to smother their minds and darken their vision. He almost felt like he could see it, behind their eyes.
Two days ago, they were normal people, Daniel thought, and bid them farewell.
It was around eight in the morning. They would go back to the station, and fetch Juanita and the rest of the others, and take them to the hospital, and then...
"What do we do after we've finished this?" he asked Rorschach, as he adjusted the navigational computer.
Rorschach grunted at him, and sat down on the floor, resting the axe shaft against his shoulder. The owlship was still cramped due to the amount of equipment that had been crammed into it, but at least there was sitting room now that the passengers had disembarked.
"You should see a doctor," Daniel said.
"Medical services will be overstretched. Probably a long wait for treatment. Don't want to sit around, surrounded by sick people. Hospitals are breeding grounds for infection - burns aren't life threatening, cause no difficulty breathing. Would be a low priority case."
"Yeah," Daniel admitted. "You're probably right. Still, we ought to stop at a hospital anyway, and just... figure things out." He slowly exhaled, and scratched at his chin. "At the very least, I want my future to involve a shave and a shower at some point. And I want to get my thoughts together and find out where Hollis might have gone."
Rorschach didn't say anything, but closed his eyes again.
===
When it had gone dark, that was when he had first known.
It wasn't an ordinary blackout. Too much of a coincidence. If he had been a weaker man, he would not have believed it was happening. There was supposed to be an official warning, but it was all wrong.
He had come to hate being being proved right.
The lights had all died at exactly the same time, as if someone had flipped a switch. It had been decided that New York was to be shut down indefinitely, although no-one had informed him of the decision. The sudden silence was obscene, and then he heard the distant bark of dogs and shouting, people shouting, uncomprehendingly. The power had gone off.
He thought he felt the city stop breathing.
His instincts had served him well for forty-five years, and now his instincts made him start running. It had not occurred to him to look up at the sky, to search for an artificial star that, for a second, had burned brighter than all the others.
There were no shelters in the area. He had checked. (He distractedly blamed Carl Sagan. The Russians did not think that nuclear war was unsurvivable. The Russians had probably built decent bunkers.) There was a subway station the next block over. At some point, he must have taken out his flashlight to guide his way, although soon there would be more light than he would ever need. He ran as if he was being chased. Later, he would not remember what the streets looked like, during those moments before it happened. He would try to visualize the last minute or so before the explosion, and recall nothing except the way that that he seemed to run without moving.
He got as far as the subway entrance, and then it all went white.
The light seemed to come from all directions, robbing the world of shadow. He had always thought of death as being darkness, but it wasn't, it was bright. He covered his face with his forearms, too late, and felt as if he was being burned away so that only his shadow would remain, and his shadow would keep running.
The first step of the subway's stair was just under his left foot. He had to keep moving, even though he couldn't see, and he appreciated that it would be ironic if he fell down the stairs and broke his neck. His hands found the rail - in his mind, it was warmer than it should have been, and he swore that he felt the heat though his gloves - and he did not know how many steps he took. It did not feel like enough.
Then the violent change in air pressure made his ears pop and snatched the breath away from his lungs, and a thousand hands tried to drag him away, trying to pull him out of the darkness. His reflexes forced him to make himself as small a target as possible and he curled up in to a foetal position, one hand still clinging on to the stair rail, and something large flew past his right shoulder; somewhere, there was a thunderous bang, and the sound of glass breaking. Then there was no sound at all, just a roaring in his ears, and it stirred a lost memory of being trapped under water, unable to hear, see, or breathe. The storm seemed to go on forever, until it was if there had never been anything in the universe except storm, and that civilisation had been but the fever dream of a dead world.
He stared down the prospect of his own extinction. It was not meaningful, or even rational, but it was all that he could have expected.
Then it was over.
He was still alive, which did not come as a great relief to him, and he was still blind. Pain loitered at the edge of his awareness; if he tried to ignore it, maybe it would go away. His face felt as if it had been flayed, but when he touched it, his face was still there. He couldn't breathe. He coughed - he air seemed to have the consistency of cotton wool - and it occurred to him that he might have been buried, but he found that he could still move.
He stood up on legs that threatened to give out on him, and he told himself that he was just fine. Unthinkingly, he tried to push his mask up over his nose in the belief that it would make it easier to breathe, but the pain made him immediately regret it.
He listened for signs of other people, but there were none. Perhaps the dust was dampening noise. (He didn't need to see the dust - he could feel it in the air.) It was a small relief when he realised that he still had his flashlight in his hand.
He sat on the steps, and waited. Slowly, painfully, his eyesight came back to him, although there was little to see. He was halfway down the steps to the subway station. The stairwell had provided sufficient shelter to spare him from the shockwave. When he looked back up the stairs, towards the street, he saw that no stars were visible, despite the lack of light pollution from the streetlamps. There was only darkness above, and darkness below.
He had to find...
===
"Christ, man, you made me jump out of my skin," said Daniel.
Rorschach struggled to focus. "What?"
"You just said my name in your sleep." Daniel sat in the pilot's chair; they were airborne again, but his attention was on Rorschach, rather than the grey sky ahead.
"Sleep?"
"Yeah, you've been out for half an hour or so. Don't look so worried, I figured you'd pass out sooner or later."
Rorschach immediately stood up. The owlship was not only airborne, but it was full of people again - it took his brain a second or so to recognize their faces. Apparently, while he had been asleep, the owlship had flown back to Fifty-Third Street station to collect the rest of the survivors; there was that woman, Juanita, and the others who had quite happily eaten Daniel's supplies but looked no better for it. They sat around, inert and docile, and it struck Rorschach how unspeakably lucky they had been to receive Daniel's help. There were many people out there who would have taken advantage of their weakened condition. It was doubtless that the subversive elements of society would seize the attack as an opportunity to mobilize.
Rorschach straightened his posture - chin up, shoulders back - and fought the urge to rub at his eyes. "Hadn't meant to..."
"It's okay," Daniel cut him off, and offered a superficial half-smile. "We're almost back at the medical center again."
Rorschach hadn't even felt the owlship takeoff or land. "Where are we?"
"Probably somewhere north of Central Park. I still can't see the ground, though. We're navigating by dead reckoning."
"Tried contacting City Hall yet?"
"I managed to find their frequency on the scanner. The dispatchers sound... stressed, so I've just been listening to them via the headset. I don't think it'd go down well if I radioed them and asked, 'hey guys, what's going on?'"
"What about the Emergency Broadcast System?"
"You mean the looped message that the remaining commercial radio stations are playing? That's no help. It just tells you to stay indoors, make sure all fires are extinguished, blah blah blah. I put it on the owlship's internal speakers and we listened to it for a while, until we got sick of hearing it." Daniel gave him a wry look. "You managed to sleep through that, too. If you hadn't been fidgeting every five seconds, I might've thought you were dead. Were you chasing rabbits?"
"What?"
"Nothing, just kidding. Er. Anyway - according to the City Hall dispatchers, the National Guard are trying to cordon off the major roads. They're not letting people in or out of the city without their say-so. Apparently, there's a mass exodus of people trying to leave on foot, probably trying to get away because they're afraid of radiation poisoning or further attacks - god knows where they think they're going." He spoke quietly. "Some people managed to fix their cars, so fights broke out when their fellow citizens tried to carjack them. The Guard are trying to evacuate people in a controlled manner, but... It's not easy." Daniel's right hand kept absently touching at his goggles, as if their presence comforted him in some small way. He seemed quite unaware of the gesture.
"Any idea yet as to hypocenter of explosion?"
Daniel spared a glance back to the owlship's passengers, and avoided the glazed pairs of eyes that were staring past him. His voice remained a low murmur. "No-one's really sure, but they think that devices were detonated over Governors Island, the Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne, and Fort Wadsworth in quick succession. Not sure what it's like outside the city yet, but they say that Suffolk County Airport on Long Island and McGuire Air Force Base are just, y'know, gone."
"Likelihood of further attacks?"
Daniel shrugged. "Operations Center seems to be preparing for them, insofar as they can."
"Civil disturbances?"
Daniel gave him a look, like he was afraid that Rorschach would ask that. He took a deep breath, and said, "Well, there's the spate of carjackings that I mentioned." After a pause that was just slightly too long, he added, "And, er, there's still rioting in Mott Haven, Soundview, Kingsbridge... All over the Bronx, really, as well as parts of Uptown Manhattan."
Rorschach opened his mouth to speak.
Daniel cut him off. "Before you say anything, no, we are not getting involved with them," he said, with an assertiveness that was better suited to Nite Owl than the overweight, flaky academic who presently sat at the owlship's controls. "There are too many other things that need doing, and we're in enough trouble as it is already. Christ, Rorschach, it's not going to be like '77."
Rorschach considered pursuing the matter, and weighed up whether or not he had the energy to waste. Daniel could be remarkably stubborn when it suited him, and Rorschach was too tired to formulate a convincing argument that didn't involve punching someone. His righteous hatred of immorality had dulled to an ember that could no longer sustain him - and he found, to his great disgust, that all he really wanted to do was drink some sugary coffee and take some painkillers.
When he tried to imagine the riots, they remained an abstract concept, more a force of nature than the product of human evil. He had seen riots before. Rationally, he knew that they should not be allowed to pass unchecked, but his exhaustion was causing the world to slip out of his hands, and his mind and body threatened to betray him.
He considered the idea of splitting up, then dismissed it. It seemed more prudent to remain with Daniel. Should they be separated, it could be difficult to locate him again, and so Rorschach told himself that he would remain with Daniel for Daniel's sake. For all his weakness, moral cowardice, and willful ignorance of reality, Daniel was a good man. Unfortunately, goodness without discretion was just a liability. No wonder there were so few decent people in existence: the universe ate them alive. That was not to say that Daniel needed mollycoddling, however - he had left him to work alone in far more dangerous circumstances. But that had been a long time ago, when he had more faith in Daniel's competency, and they had both been younger, so they had felt as if they would live forever. Now, Rorschach could number the extra lines around Daniel's eyes. Daniel had grown soft and slow, and Rorschach should have despised him for it, or felt nothing at all.
"Fine," Rorschach conceded.
For some reason, Daniel seemed surprised by this response. He squinted at Rorschach for a moment, then fiddled with the mouthpiece of his radio headset. "Okay then," he said, and focused on piloting the owlship again.
Rorschach made a token effort to stay standing, then gave up and sat back down on the floor. The dust still tickled his nostrils, and the inside of his nose felt constricted, as if he had a cold. Even so, he was still aware of how the passengers made the owlship smell of people - a powdery, grimy smell, like a mix of sweat and chemicals - and it reminded him of hostels, homeless shelters and subway stations, and all the other transient places, the temporary shelters in the world. It was a completely ridiculous thing to resent, but resent it he did.
He noticed the woman, Juanita, looking at him, and he stared back until she glanced away.
===
The owlship landed on Henry Hudson Parkway a second time. Daniel opened the hatch so that the passengers could emerge, blinking, in to the relative daylight. The sky still threatened further rain and the clouds seemed so low that you could almost touch them, but it still preferable to being underground.
Washington Heights still looked deceptively, beautifully, amazingly normal, despite the fact that it seemed to be empty. There were no people outdoors. No cars moving on the roads. Just an owlship full of survivors, a raw-faced ghost with red hair, and an ornithologist with a history of violence. There were trees on either side of the parkway, and they stood undamaged, as if they had always stood there, and would continue to stand there long after everything else had gone.
Daniel heard ambulance sirens in the distance, through the smog. He thought that he could smell smoke in the air, until he realised that the odour was coming off his clothes.
Juanita shepherded out her damaged, grimy flock of Newyorkus troglodytes.
"The medical center is just over that way," said Daniel, gesturing westwards. "Go up the road a bit, then turn right. Columbia-Presbyterian will be somewhere on your left. You can't miss it."
"Thank you," Juanita said, in a way that made them both avoid each other's eyes.
Daniel shrugged. He meant to say something about civic duty, but instead muttered something about how she would have done the same, if she'd had an owlship, which would technically be illegal anyway. Christ, during the seventies, it had been so rare for people to actually thank him - probably because most of his interaction with other human beings had involved beating them up, but still... He cleared his throat. "Can you do me a favor?"
"Anything."
Daniel pushed a few grubby strands of hair back from his face. "It's a shot in the dark, but if you can get a message to a guy called Hollis Mason - he's in his late sixties, silver hair, kind of spry - tell him that Daniel Dreiberg is alive and looking for him, okay? And..." He thought carefully about what he was going to say next - he couldn't help it, but for some reason he ended up casting a cautious glance in Rorschach's direction. Rorschach was loitering by the owlship's controls, looking completely disinterested, so Daniel continued, "...There's a woman called Laurie Juspeczyk. I have no idea where she is, but... Well. She's got long brown hair, she's in her thirties but looks younger-..."
Juanita cut him off. "Yeah, I know who Laurie Juspeczyk is," she said - not impolitely, but as if Laurie's identity was pretty obvious. Which it was, really - after all, Laurie had been something of a minor celebrity from an early age. (Which probably helped to explain why she often looked so grumpy about everything. According to Hollis, the Jupiter estate had once needed to pay a sizeable sum to a tabloid photographer after Laurie had 'slugged the guy, right in the kisser' for trying to take an upskirt picture of her as she exited a taxi. Sally had been livid. It turned out that there was such a thing as bad publicity, after all.)
Ah, Laurie.
Daniel's mind returned to the present. "Oh. Well. Tell her I'm okay too, I guess."
"You mask types don't have some sort of high-tech communication network?" Juanita smiled slightly.
"We had AT&T, once."
"No teleporters or decoder rings? Damn." Juanita's smile became more wry. "I bet you keep some interesting company, Mr. Dreiberg. Be careful, alright?"
It was mutually understood by the both of them that Juanita had about as much chance of meeting Hollis or Laurie as she did of walking on the moon - but of course, they both chose to overlook that little fact. Taking a shot in the dark rarely achieved much in the long run, but at least it made the dark seem slightly brighter for a moment.
They shook hands, and then Daniel watched Juanita and the other survivors walk away.
He wondered if he'd ever see them again. Probably not.
When he eventually stepped back inside the owlship, Rorschach was leaning against the inside of the hull, popping an Advil out of a blister pack. Daniel went to get a bottle of water before slouching down in the pilot's seat again, and took a sip from it before offering it to Rorschach, who shook his head in refusal.
"You do know that we've got some Vicodin, right?" he told Rorschach.
"Too soporific," Rorschach said - then added, devoid of sympathy, "Lost your house. Anywhere else to live?"
Daniel didn't immediately reply, but pretended that he was busy with the owlship's pre-takeoff checks. After a moment, he said, "I, well... My family has a summer house on Martha's Vineyard, I guess."
"Island might be an ideal location in some respects. Might be wise to relocate to there before the epidemics begin. Downside is the fact that many supplies will have to be imported by boat or aircraft, and supply routes have been badly interrupted. Have nowhere else?"
"Not really, no. Well. In a pinch, I could stay with relatives." Assuming that he still had relatives. Some of them must have survived. The Dreibergs were a tenacious lot - they hadn't earned their fortune by being a bunch of pushovers. The thought of staying with family made his teeth itch. Good god, it was turning out to be a particularly unenjoyable conversation. "What about you?"
A grunt. "Will manage."
Daniel guided Archie through takeoff. It would not be wise to remain in one place for too long, although he had not yet decided where to go next. He decided that he would set Archie down somewhere in Fort Washington Park while they both gathered their wits - the parkway was unusually quiet, but it was too exposed and in the open, and he hated the way that the road stretched ahead and disappeared in to the smog, so that any approaching traffic would be impossible to see.
The owlship ascended, and he took a deep breath as he felt gravity push him down in to his seat, and observed as the world below grew smaller. "The other day, you said that we should plan to leave the city," he said, trying to focus the conversation back on Rorschach, rather than his own homelessness.
"Was merely suggesting that you should consider it. Wouldn't leave the city myself."
"So you'd stay in New York. Despite everything." Daniel briefly glanced over his shoulder to look at the other man.
"Have thought about it. Decided that I wouldn't desert the city in time of need."
Whatever, Rorschach. You're not cut out for martyrdom. Daniel turned away and, once he had his back to Rorschach, rolled his eyes. "Oh, right. But it's okay for me to leave, is it?"
There was a very long pause.
And then Rorschach just shrugged, as if he couldn't care less, either way. "You're fat, lazy, and out of shape. Already look exhausted. You spent the late seventies making clear that you were retired. Suspect that your jaunt with Miss Jupiter was an exception, the posturing of a man trying to show off in front of a new lady friend, one last desperate affair in the face of Armageddon, rather than the indication of a return to long-term activity. Go to Martha's Vineyard, Daniel."
Well, Daniel thought.
Ouch.
Daniel remained silent as he watched the numbers on the altimeter roll behind their glass, then said, "How did you know I was with Laurie?"
"Read about the tenement rescue in the newspaper," Rorschach said, without missing a beat.
Daniel did not reply, but instead concentrated on piloting the owlship over to the long green expanse of Fort Washington. He set the aircraft down by the Hudson's shore, on an open patch of grass that, in better weather, might have once provided a place for families to picnic. It struck him that he had never actually been to Fort Washington Park before, despite its reputation as a good place to the peregrine falcons that lived around the bridge. Most of Daniel's time in New York had been spent in Brooklyn, or lower Manhattan, with the occasional excursion to the Bronx. When he had first moved to the city, he had considered buying a home in Queens, but had decided against it for some trivial reason that he had long since forgotten. Lorenz's damn butterfly had flapped its wings, again; things could have been very different.
When they landed, Daniel stood up from the pilot's seat, turned to face Rorschach properly, and stared down at the guy.
"I'm going to volunteer with FEMA, Civil Defense, whatever," he said, not caring about how petulant he sounded. "Shit, for all I know, the owlship might be the only functional non-military aircraft in the city, and it's definitely the only one that doesn't require a landing pad, runway or mooring mast. It'd be invaluable for transporting people and supplies."
Rorschach gave Daniel a blank look, and canted his head to one side. Without his mask, the gesture seemed uncanny. Daniel found himself wishing that Rorschach was in the habit of blinking more often. "And you think the police will let you do that. No questions asked."
"That's why I'm going to go through the police to contact them, as a sign of good faith. I'm out of my depth - if I'm going to get anything done, then I'm going to have to work with the authorities. Jesus Christ, if we can't work together in a time of crisis, then we're all screwed. They can't just turn me away because of... bullshit political disagreements that happened eight years ago."
"Eight years ago is not a very long time," Rorschach said. "Less so for some than others."
Oh. Daniel regarded New York's last resident vigilante. "Look," he said irritably, and perhaps without enough conviction. "No-one shed any tears over the deaths of Grice and Furniss. The cops'll have worse things to worry about than you."
"Underestimate human pettiness, Daniel," said Rorschach, and Daniel bit his tongue to stop himself from saying, 'petty? You left a dead rapist on their doorstep.' Something like that would only help to prove Rorschach's point. "Police will go through you to get to me. NYPD corrupt and untrustworthy at best of times. This is not the best of times."
Daniel took a few paces along the cabin. "Maybe you can strike some sort of deal with them. Hell, look at all the assholes who are still out there because they're working as informants. Surely you can make some sort of truce with each other. Christ, a third of New York has been nuked - your goddamn feud with the cops is pretty inconsequential in light of things, don't you think?"
"No deals. If you want to work with the authorities, do so. As saying goes, it's your funeral. Can go our separate ways."
"Shit. Jesus." Daniel rubbed at his eyes, and stared at the man. "So I have to choose between helping the authorities and helping you, is that it?" He tried to think of a third option, but his mind was numb. And Rorschach probably didn't believe in third options, anyway.
"Simply warning you for your own sake. They won't make things easy."
"This is goddamn ridiculous," Daniel said. "We're at war, for Christ's sake - and you're still running from the police of your own country. I spend years doing all sorts of illegal things, and now I suddenly want to help in a way that's legal, I can't, because you're convinced that everyone's out to get you, and you might be right, because God knows that our public relations are so bad that people still blame us for a riot that happened almost a decade ago, and everyone thinks you're psychotic. I tell you that this might be a good opportunity to repair the bridges that you've been burning for the last twenty years, and you won't hear it, because you're too damn obstinate and, like most paranoiacs, you think that the world revolves around you."
Daniel paused, and realised that Rorschach was staring at him.
"Finished?" said Rorschach, quietly.
Daniel shrugged, and slouched back down in the pilot's chair.
Rorschach hefted his fire axe on to one shoulder, and crouched to scavenge through a bag of supplies. "Settles it, then. We work separately," he said.
"No," Daniel said. Rorschach didn't appear to hear him. "No, we don't," Daniel repeated. "Rorschach..."
Rorschach looked up, eyes narrowed slightly. One of these days, Daniel thought, I'm pretty sure we're going to kill each other, and save the Russians the job.
Daniel rubbed at his temples, and forced a smile. "You saved my life. That means you're stuck with me."
Rorschach remained silent, considering this, then murmured, "Not a paranoiac, Daniel."
Yes, you are. But I think that you have good reason to be. "Sorry, man. I'm just tired, I guess. You are obstinate, though."
The last sentence had meant to come out as a an offhand comment, a glib remark meant to lighten the conversation (Daniel didn't think that Rorschach would ever see obstinacy as a negative trait) but it fell completely flat. Rorschach stared at him again, and Daniel was struck by how wary he looked. There was something in Rorschach's expression that made him look both very old and very young at the same time. It was disconcerting.
For the last ten years, Daniel had switched between feeling pity, fear and irritation towards the man, and he had never once paused to wonder if Rorschach had picked up on it.
Ah, hell.
Daniel leaned back in the pilot's seat, and looked up at the cabin's ceiling. "I'm kind of an asshole today, aren't I?"
"Not necessarily," said Rorschach, terse but contrite. He rose to his feet, leaving the axe and the bag of supplies on the floor, and eyed Daniel silently, poker-faced and pensive. Then he looked away, and paced over to the owlship's open hatch. It opened with a quiet hiss, and Rorschach looked out across the Hudson. Daniel wanted to tell him to shut the door and stop letting all the warm air out of the cabin because it was cold, but said nothing.
The far shore of Edgewater was barely visible through the haze, and the wind created little white crests on the water, but did nothing to disperse the smog. Despite the fact that it was early morning, the world was dark and quiet, like an abandoned movie set, waiting for something. And, as Rorschach regarded the river, Daniel regarded Rorschach. Rorschach seemed to be indifferent or oblivious to the temperature - if anything, he loosened his scarf as if he was too warm, and Daniel found himself looking at the pale, grubby skin on the back of Rorschach's neck.
"How much fuel left?" Rorschach asked.
"Enough to last for a good while," Daniel replied, grateful for the change in topic. He didn't mention that the owlship's current tank of fuel was probably the last that it would ever have, unless he could somehow find enough money and a discreet supplier. That almost went without saying.
"Can still make it to Martha's Vineyard," Rorschach said. He pronounced the quaint name as if it was something reprehensible, and Daniel felt a small spike of amusement.
"No. Like I said, you're stuck with me, and I still need to find Hollis. I guess we can still try to help without getting involved with the authorities - after all, that was how we used to do things, right?"
In retrospect, operating independently of the police and emergency services had never seemed like a particularly efficient way of doing things, but Daniel supposed that it was better than nothing. His biggest concern was that he and Rorschach likely had completely different ideas of what the word 'help' entailed. Rorschach's concept of 'help' usually put people in hospital, and that was if they were lucky.
Daniel thought about it, then added, "...And, hell, I'm going to try to contact Adrian."
Rorschach replied with a grunt, which was eloquent enough to express all that he had to say about Adrian Veidt. However, it was an inescapable fact: Adrian probably had more resources than God. If Daniel couldn't co-operate with the authorities, then he could at least co-operate with Adrian Veidt, who was practically an authority unto himself.
Daniel waited for some sort of resistance from Rorschach, but the other man didn't argue.
And that, at least, felt like progress.
======
Author's Note: I'm not sure if the beginning of this chapter was subliminally influenced by Biff's Question Song or not.
Minor nitpicky detail: In chapter 3, Daniel mentioned New York Hosptial - that's been retconned and changed to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, instead. (IRL, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center was renamed to Columbia University Medical Center in 1997, when it became part of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, which used to be two separate hospitals, New York Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital... Er, hence my confusion.)
Characters: Rorschach/Nite Owl II
Rating: PG-13
Word count (this section): 6231
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
Summary: AU. The Cold War reaches its ultimate conclusion, and Rorschach and Daniel are among the survivors when the East Coast is attacked.
Chapter Index.
===
It finally rained during the flight to the hospital: huge, fat black drops that left greasy smears on Archie's windows. Daniel thought of tadpoles falling from the sky, and there was a very unpleasant moment where he felt as if Rorschach was reading his mind, because Rorschach said, "A plague of frogs."
Daniel wondered if being creepy came easily to Rorschach, or if it was something that he'd had to work at.
The poor weather just made the visibility even worse. If it had not been for the rather unusual nature of their situation, then Daniel would not have attempted the flight. The VOR and DME stations weren't 'speaking' to him, there were no lights or landmarks visible from the air - not even Manhattan's skyscrapers were visible through the clouds below - and his only aid was the owlship's inertial navigation system. Instrument flying had always been his forte, but that felt like rather a small consolation in light of the present circumstances. He caught himself drumming his index finger against the control stick, and hoped that no-one else had noticed the nervous gesture.
If the passengers had picked up on his unease, then they did not obviously show it. For the most part, the cabin was silent - there were few distractions from the static and chatter in Daniel's radio headset, and he was immensely glad when people occasionally spoke, even if they did say things like:
"Weren't you the guy who was involved in the Iran hostage thing?" Answer: No, that was the Comedian.
"Is this thing safe?" Answer: Yes. (Asshole.)
"What do you think of Rorschach?" Answer: No comment.
"Were you in 'Nam?" Answer: No, that was also the Comedian.
"Why do you think you masks were all a bunch of white guys?" Answer: I, er... (Thus followed a small debate as to whether Rorschach was white or not. Rorschach remained studiously uninterested throughout. One of the passengers also felt the need to point out that, technically speaking, Doc Manhattan was blue.)
"Do you know Adrian Veidt?" Answer: Yes.
"What's Adrian Veidt like?" Answer: He's a nice guy.
"Is Adrian Veidt gay?" Answer: What he does in private is his own business.
"Have you ever been shot?" Answer: Yes.
"What's it like?" Answer: It hurts a lot.
Even in the face of disaster, people never really stopped being people. That was their blessing and that was their curse.
Every so often, Daniel glanced over to Rorschach, just to check that he was okay. Rorschach was leaning against the inside of the hull, still standing, with his eyes closed. Daniel would have thought that he was asleep on his feet, if it wasn't for the way that Rorschach's grip tightened whenever the fire axe threatened to slip out of his hand.
"Hey," Daniel said quietly, and reached out to give Rorschach a gentle nudge.
Rorschach's eyes blinked into focus.
"You alright?" Daniel asked, and thought, I bet he's going to say that he's fine, and that he's just resting his eyes or something.
"Just resting my eyes," said Rorschach.
Ha.
"Don't make yourself sick or anything," Daniel said, and felt his heart sink slightly at the pleading note in his own voice. You could no more negotiate with Rorschach than you could negotiate with the weather.
Rorschach didn't even bother to offer a token 'I'm fine,' in way of reply. He just grunted, as if ill health was solely the province of the weak and stupid, and Daniel felt a conflicting desire to both smile and punch him, quite possibly at the same time.
Many years ago, Daniel had once invested time and effort in trying to keep Rorschach alive and on the right side of the law; ultimately, it had been about as productive as banging his head against a wall. Rorschach had viewed his concern as condescending and intrusive - and, in retrospect, Daniel supposed that his younger self had been a bit like one of those foolish, well-meaning women who attached themselves to 'troubled' men and tried to 'help' them. But I can change him, ma, really I can. There was no changing Rorschach. The best you could do was co-exist with him, and keep a wide berth when he occasionally did things to piss off the police.
(Like murder people.)
Daniel really wished that Rorschach would put the fire axe down.
"If you collapse from exhaustion, I'm going to leave you where you drop," Daniel muttered, safe in the knowledge that neither of them believed it.
Once they were over Harlem, the rain began to lessen to a half-hearted drizzle, and the visibility was slightly better. Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center was a handful of miles ahead, slotted somewhere in the neat grey grid of New York's streets; the map told Daniel that it was in Washington Heights, very close to the bank of the Hudson. He could almost make out the outline of Washington Bridge in the distance.
From what little he could see, all of the buildings still seemed to be intact. He wondered how lower Manhattan had fared.
Daniel cleared his throat. "Guys, I'm going to take the owlship down a short distance away from the medical center. If there are any cops in the area, then I don't have the time or energy to be butting heads with them, and I imagine that the feeling is mutual. Er... It'd be appreciated if you didn't mention me (us, he silently amended in his mind) to the authorities."
His words were met with a murmur of assent. If the people had any ethical qualms about the fact that they were riding around in an illegal aircraft that violated a whole mess of of airspace regulations, they weren't about to complain. Hell, it was likely that they were blissfully unaware of the number of laws that Archie broke simply by existing. The Federal Aviation Authority were probably the only people who had come to hate Nite Owl as much as the NYPD did.
Daniel set them down somewhere on the Henry Hudson Parkway, confirmed that the people were okay to walk from there, and gave them directions. They thanked him, awkwardly, as politely as they could. Pain and exhaustion had filled their heads with white noise, and Daniel had a small insight in to how they felt - it was as if the endless smog had somehow managed to get under their skin, to smother their minds and darken their vision. He almost felt like he could see it, behind their eyes.
Two days ago, they were normal people, Daniel thought, and bid them farewell.
It was around eight in the morning. They would go back to the station, and fetch Juanita and the rest of the others, and take them to the hospital, and then...
"What do we do after we've finished this?" he asked Rorschach, as he adjusted the navigational computer.
Rorschach grunted at him, and sat down on the floor, resting the axe shaft against his shoulder. The owlship was still cramped due to the amount of equipment that had been crammed into it, but at least there was sitting room now that the passengers had disembarked.
"You should see a doctor," Daniel said.
"Medical services will be overstretched. Probably a long wait for treatment. Don't want to sit around, surrounded by sick people. Hospitals are breeding grounds for infection - burns aren't life threatening, cause no difficulty breathing. Would be a low priority case."
"Yeah," Daniel admitted. "You're probably right. Still, we ought to stop at a hospital anyway, and just... figure things out." He slowly exhaled, and scratched at his chin. "At the very least, I want my future to involve a shave and a shower at some point. And I want to get my thoughts together and find out where Hollis might have gone."
Rorschach didn't say anything, but closed his eyes again.
===
When it had gone dark, that was when he had first known.
It wasn't an ordinary blackout. Too much of a coincidence. If he had been a weaker man, he would not have believed it was happening. There was supposed to be an official warning, but it was all wrong.
He had come to hate being being proved right.
The lights had all died at exactly the same time, as if someone had flipped a switch. It had been decided that New York was to be shut down indefinitely, although no-one had informed him of the decision. The sudden silence was obscene, and then he heard the distant bark of dogs and shouting, people shouting, uncomprehendingly. The power had gone off.
He thought he felt the city stop breathing.
His instincts had served him well for forty-five years, and now his instincts made him start running. It had not occurred to him to look up at the sky, to search for an artificial star that, for a second, had burned brighter than all the others.
There were no shelters in the area. He had checked. (He distractedly blamed Carl Sagan. The Russians did not think that nuclear war was unsurvivable. The Russians had probably built decent bunkers.) There was a subway station the next block over. At some point, he must have taken out his flashlight to guide his way, although soon there would be more light than he would ever need. He ran as if he was being chased. Later, he would not remember what the streets looked like, during those moments before it happened. He would try to visualize the last minute or so before the explosion, and recall nothing except the way that that he seemed to run without moving.
He got as far as the subway entrance, and then it all went white.
The light seemed to come from all directions, robbing the world of shadow. He had always thought of death as being darkness, but it wasn't, it was bright. He covered his face with his forearms, too late, and felt as if he was being burned away so that only his shadow would remain, and his shadow would keep running.
The first step of the subway's stair was just under his left foot. He had to keep moving, even though he couldn't see, and he appreciated that it would be ironic if he fell down the stairs and broke his neck. His hands found the rail - in his mind, it was warmer than it should have been, and he swore that he felt the heat though his gloves - and he did not know how many steps he took. It did not feel like enough.
Then the violent change in air pressure made his ears pop and snatched the breath away from his lungs, and a thousand hands tried to drag him away, trying to pull him out of the darkness. His reflexes forced him to make himself as small a target as possible and he curled up in to a foetal position, one hand still clinging on to the stair rail, and something large flew past his right shoulder; somewhere, there was a thunderous bang, and the sound of glass breaking. Then there was no sound at all, just a roaring in his ears, and it stirred a lost memory of being trapped under water, unable to hear, see, or breathe. The storm seemed to go on forever, until it was if there had never been anything in the universe except storm, and that civilisation had been but the fever dream of a dead world.
He stared down the prospect of his own extinction. It was not meaningful, or even rational, but it was all that he could have expected.
Then it was over.
He was still alive, which did not come as a great relief to him, and he was still blind. Pain loitered at the edge of his awareness; if he tried to ignore it, maybe it would go away. His face felt as if it had been flayed, but when he touched it, his face was still there. He couldn't breathe. He coughed - he air seemed to have the consistency of cotton wool - and it occurred to him that he might have been buried, but he found that he could still move.
He stood up on legs that threatened to give out on him, and he told himself that he was just fine. Unthinkingly, he tried to push his mask up over his nose in the belief that it would make it easier to breathe, but the pain made him immediately regret it.
He listened for signs of other people, but there were none. Perhaps the dust was dampening noise. (He didn't need to see the dust - he could feel it in the air.) It was a small relief when he realised that he still had his flashlight in his hand.
He sat on the steps, and waited. Slowly, painfully, his eyesight came back to him, although there was little to see. He was halfway down the steps to the subway station. The stairwell had provided sufficient shelter to spare him from the shockwave. When he looked back up the stairs, towards the street, he saw that no stars were visible, despite the lack of light pollution from the streetlamps. There was only darkness above, and darkness below.
He had to find...
===
"Christ, man, you made me jump out of my skin," said Daniel.
Rorschach struggled to focus. "What?"
"You just said my name in your sleep." Daniel sat in the pilot's chair; they were airborne again, but his attention was on Rorschach, rather than the grey sky ahead.
"Sleep?"
"Yeah, you've been out for half an hour or so. Don't look so worried, I figured you'd pass out sooner or later."
Rorschach immediately stood up. The owlship was not only airborne, but it was full of people again - it took his brain a second or so to recognize their faces. Apparently, while he had been asleep, the owlship had flown back to Fifty-Third Street station to collect the rest of the survivors; there was that woman, Juanita, and the others who had quite happily eaten Daniel's supplies but looked no better for it. They sat around, inert and docile, and it struck Rorschach how unspeakably lucky they had been to receive Daniel's help. There were many people out there who would have taken advantage of their weakened condition. It was doubtless that the subversive elements of society would seize the attack as an opportunity to mobilize.
Rorschach straightened his posture - chin up, shoulders back - and fought the urge to rub at his eyes. "Hadn't meant to..."
"It's okay," Daniel cut him off, and offered a superficial half-smile. "We're almost back at the medical center again."
Rorschach hadn't even felt the owlship takeoff or land. "Where are we?"
"Probably somewhere north of Central Park. I still can't see the ground, though. We're navigating by dead reckoning."
"Tried contacting City Hall yet?"
"I managed to find their frequency on the scanner. The dispatchers sound... stressed, so I've just been listening to them via the headset. I don't think it'd go down well if I radioed them and asked, 'hey guys, what's going on?'"
"What about the Emergency Broadcast System?"
"You mean the looped message that the remaining commercial radio stations are playing? That's no help. It just tells you to stay indoors, make sure all fires are extinguished, blah blah blah. I put it on the owlship's internal speakers and we listened to it for a while, until we got sick of hearing it." Daniel gave him a wry look. "You managed to sleep through that, too. If you hadn't been fidgeting every five seconds, I might've thought you were dead. Were you chasing rabbits?"
"What?"
"Nothing, just kidding. Er. Anyway - according to the City Hall dispatchers, the National Guard are trying to cordon off the major roads. They're not letting people in or out of the city without their say-so. Apparently, there's a mass exodus of people trying to leave on foot, probably trying to get away because they're afraid of radiation poisoning or further attacks - god knows where they think they're going." He spoke quietly. "Some people managed to fix their cars, so fights broke out when their fellow citizens tried to carjack them. The Guard are trying to evacuate people in a controlled manner, but... It's not easy." Daniel's right hand kept absently touching at his goggles, as if their presence comforted him in some small way. He seemed quite unaware of the gesture.
"Any idea yet as to hypocenter of explosion?"
Daniel spared a glance back to the owlship's passengers, and avoided the glazed pairs of eyes that were staring past him. His voice remained a low murmur. "No-one's really sure, but they think that devices were detonated over Governors Island, the Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne, and Fort Wadsworth in quick succession. Not sure what it's like outside the city yet, but they say that Suffolk County Airport on Long Island and McGuire Air Force Base are just, y'know, gone."
"Likelihood of further attacks?"
Daniel shrugged. "Operations Center seems to be preparing for them, insofar as they can."
"Civil disturbances?"
Daniel gave him a look, like he was afraid that Rorschach would ask that. He took a deep breath, and said, "Well, there's the spate of carjackings that I mentioned." After a pause that was just slightly too long, he added, "And, er, there's still rioting in Mott Haven, Soundview, Kingsbridge... All over the Bronx, really, as well as parts of Uptown Manhattan."
Rorschach opened his mouth to speak.
Daniel cut him off. "Before you say anything, no, we are not getting involved with them," he said, with an assertiveness that was better suited to Nite Owl than the overweight, flaky academic who presently sat at the owlship's controls. "There are too many other things that need doing, and we're in enough trouble as it is already. Christ, Rorschach, it's not going to be like '77."
Rorschach considered pursuing the matter, and weighed up whether or not he had the energy to waste. Daniel could be remarkably stubborn when it suited him, and Rorschach was too tired to formulate a convincing argument that didn't involve punching someone. His righteous hatred of immorality had dulled to an ember that could no longer sustain him - and he found, to his great disgust, that all he really wanted to do was drink some sugary coffee and take some painkillers.
When he tried to imagine the riots, they remained an abstract concept, more a force of nature than the product of human evil. He had seen riots before. Rationally, he knew that they should not be allowed to pass unchecked, but his exhaustion was causing the world to slip out of his hands, and his mind and body threatened to betray him.
He considered the idea of splitting up, then dismissed it. It seemed more prudent to remain with Daniel. Should they be separated, it could be difficult to locate him again, and so Rorschach told himself that he would remain with Daniel for Daniel's sake. For all his weakness, moral cowardice, and willful ignorance of reality, Daniel was a good man. Unfortunately, goodness without discretion was just a liability. No wonder there were so few decent people in existence: the universe ate them alive. That was not to say that Daniel needed mollycoddling, however - he had left him to work alone in far more dangerous circumstances. But that had been a long time ago, when he had more faith in Daniel's competency, and they had both been younger, so they had felt as if they would live forever. Now, Rorschach could number the extra lines around Daniel's eyes. Daniel had grown soft and slow, and Rorschach should have despised him for it, or felt nothing at all.
"Fine," Rorschach conceded.
For some reason, Daniel seemed surprised by this response. He squinted at Rorschach for a moment, then fiddled with the mouthpiece of his radio headset. "Okay then," he said, and focused on piloting the owlship again.
Rorschach made a token effort to stay standing, then gave up and sat back down on the floor. The dust still tickled his nostrils, and the inside of his nose felt constricted, as if he had a cold. Even so, he was still aware of how the passengers made the owlship smell of people - a powdery, grimy smell, like a mix of sweat and chemicals - and it reminded him of hostels, homeless shelters and subway stations, and all the other transient places, the temporary shelters in the world. It was a completely ridiculous thing to resent, but resent it he did.
He noticed the woman, Juanita, looking at him, and he stared back until she glanced away.
===
The owlship landed on Henry Hudson Parkway a second time. Daniel opened the hatch so that the passengers could emerge, blinking, in to the relative daylight. The sky still threatened further rain and the clouds seemed so low that you could almost touch them, but it still preferable to being underground.
Washington Heights still looked deceptively, beautifully, amazingly normal, despite the fact that it seemed to be empty. There were no people outdoors. No cars moving on the roads. Just an owlship full of survivors, a raw-faced ghost with red hair, and an ornithologist with a history of violence. There were trees on either side of the parkway, and they stood undamaged, as if they had always stood there, and would continue to stand there long after everything else had gone.
Daniel heard ambulance sirens in the distance, through the smog. He thought that he could smell smoke in the air, until he realised that the odour was coming off his clothes.
Juanita shepherded out her damaged, grimy flock of Newyorkus troglodytes.
"The medical center is just over that way," said Daniel, gesturing westwards. "Go up the road a bit, then turn right. Columbia-Presbyterian will be somewhere on your left. You can't miss it."
"Thank you," Juanita said, in a way that made them both avoid each other's eyes.
Daniel shrugged. He meant to say something about civic duty, but instead muttered something about how she would have done the same, if she'd had an owlship, which would technically be illegal anyway. Christ, during the seventies, it had been so rare for people to actually thank him - probably because most of his interaction with other human beings had involved beating them up, but still... He cleared his throat. "Can you do me a favor?"
"Anything."
Daniel pushed a few grubby strands of hair back from his face. "It's a shot in the dark, but if you can get a message to a guy called Hollis Mason - he's in his late sixties, silver hair, kind of spry - tell him that Daniel Dreiberg is alive and looking for him, okay? And..." He thought carefully about what he was going to say next - he couldn't help it, but for some reason he ended up casting a cautious glance in Rorschach's direction. Rorschach was loitering by the owlship's controls, looking completely disinterested, so Daniel continued, "...There's a woman called Laurie Juspeczyk. I have no idea where she is, but... Well. She's got long brown hair, she's in her thirties but looks younger-..."
Juanita cut him off. "Yeah, I know who Laurie Juspeczyk is," she said - not impolitely, but as if Laurie's identity was pretty obvious. Which it was, really - after all, Laurie had been something of a minor celebrity from an early age. (Which probably helped to explain why she often looked so grumpy about everything. According to Hollis, the Jupiter estate had once needed to pay a sizeable sum to a tabloid photographer after Laurie had 'slugged the guy, right in the kisser' for trying to take an upskirt picture of her as she exited a taxi. Sally had been livid. It turned out that there was such a thing as bad publicity, after all.)
Ah, Laurie.
Daniel's mind returned to the present. "Oh. Well. Tell her I'm okay too, I guess."
"You mask types don't have some sort of high-tech communication network?" Juanita smiled slightly.
"We had AT&T, once."
"No teleporters or decoder rings? Damn." Juanita's smile became more wry. "I bet you keep some interesting company, Mr. Dreiberg. Be careful, alright?"
It was mutually understood by the both of them that Juanita had about as much chance of meeting Hollis or Laurie as she did of walking on the moon - but of course, they both chose to overlook that little fact. Taking a shot in the dark rarely achieved much in the long run, but at least it made the dark seem slightly brighter for a moment.
They shook hands, and then Daniel watched Juanita and the other survivors walk away.
He wondered if he'd ever see them again. Probably not.
When he eventually stepped back inside the owlship, Rorschach was leaning against the inside of the hull, popping an Advil out of a blister pack. Daniel went to get a bottle of water before slouching down in the pilot's seat again, and took a sip from it before offering it to Rorschach, who shook his head in refusal.
"You do know that we've got some Vicodin, right?" he told Rorschach.
"Too soporific," Rorschach said - then added, devoid of sympathy, "Lost your house. Anywhere else to live?"
Daniel didn't immediately reply, but pretended that he was busy with the owlship's pre-takeoff checks. After a moment, he said, "I, well... My family has a summer house on Martha's Vineyard, I guess."
"Island might be an ideal location in some respects. Might be wise to relocate to there before the epidemics begin. Downside is the fact that many supplies will have to be imported by boat or aircraft, and supply routes have been badly interrupted. Have nowhere else?"
"Not really, no. Well. In a pinch, I could stay with relatives." Assuming that he still had relatives. Some of them must have survived. The Dreibergs were a tenacious lot - they hadn't earned their fortune by being a bunch of pushovers. The thought of staying with family made his teeth itch. Good god, it was turning out to be a particularly unenjoyable conversation. "What about you?"
A grunt. "Will manage."
Daniel guided Archie through takeoff. It would not be wise to remain in one place for too long, although he had not yet decided where to go next. He decided that he would set Archie down somewhere in Fort Washington Park while they both gathered their wits - the parkway was unusually quiet, but it was too exposed and in the open, and he hated the way that the road stretched ahead and disappeared in to the smog, so that any approaching traffic would be impossible to see.
The owlship ascended, and he took a deep breath as he felt gravity push him down in to his seat, and observed as the world below grew smaller. "The other day, you said that we should plan to leave the city," he said, trying to focus the conversation back on Rorschach, rather than his own homelessness.
"Was merely suggesting that you should consider it. Wouldn't leave the city myself."
"So you'd stay in New York. Despite everything." Daniel briefly glanced over his shoulder to look at the other man.
"Have thought about it. Decided that I wouldn't desert the city in time of need."
Whatever, Rorschach. You're not cut out for martyrdom. Daniel turned away and, once he had his back to Rorschach, rolled his eyes. "Oh, right. But it's okay for me to leave, is it?"
There was a very long pause.
And then Rorschach just shrugged, as if he couldn't care less, either way. "You're fat, lazy, and out of shape. Already look exhausted. You spent the late seventies making clear that you were retired. Suspect that your jaunt with Miss Jupiter was an exception, the posturing of a man trying to show off in front of a new lady friend, one last desperate affair in the face of Armageddon, rather than the indication of a return to long-term activity. Go to Martha's Vineyard, Daniel."
Well, Daniel thought.
Ouch.
Daniel remained silent as he watched the numbers on the altimeter roll behind their glass, then said, "How did you know I was with Laurie?"
"Read about the tenement rescue in the newspaper," Rorschach said, without missing a beat.
Daniel did not reply, but instead concentrated on piloting the owlship over to the long green expanse of Fort Washington. He set the aircraft down by the Hudson's shore, on an open patch of grass that, in better weather, might have once provided a place for families to picnic. It struck him that he had never actually been to Fort Washington Park before, despite its reputation as a good place to the peregrine falcons that lived around the bridge. Most of Daniel's time in New York had been spent in Brooklyn, or lower Manhattan, with the occasional excursion to the Bronx. When he had first moved to the city, he had considered buying a home in Queens, but had decided against it for some trivial reason that he had long since forgotten. Lorenz's damn butterfly had flapped its wings, again; things could have been very different.
When they landed, Daniel stood up from the pilot's seat, turned to face Rorschach properly, and stared down at the guy.
"I'm going to volunteer with FEMA, Civil Defense, whatever," he said, not caring about how petulant he sounded. "Shit, for all I know, the owlship might be the only functional non-military aircraft in the city, and it's definitely the only one that doesn't require a landing pad, runway or mooring mast. It'd be invaluable for transporting people and supplies."
Rorschach gave Daniel a blank look, and canted his head to one side. Without his mask, the gesture seemed uncanny. Daniel found himself wishing that Rorschach was in the habit of blinking more often. "And you think the police will let you do that. No questions asked."
"That's why I'm going to go through the police to contact them, as a sign of good faith. I'm out of my depth - if I'm going to get anything done, then I'm going to have to work with the authorities. Jesus Christ, if we can't work together in a time of crisis, then we're all screwed. They can't just turn me away because of... bullshit political disagreements that happened eight years ago."
"Eight years ago is not a very long time," Rorschach said. "Less so for some than others."
Oh. Daniel regarded New York's last resident vigilante. "Look," he said irritably, and perhaps without enough conviction. "No-one shed any tears over the deaths of Grice and Furniss. The cops'll have worse things to worry about than you."
"Underestimate human pettiness, Daniel," said Rorschach, and Daniel bit his tongue to stop himself from saying, 'petty? You left a dead rapist on their doorstep.' Something like that would only help to prove Rorschach's point. "Police will go through you to get to me. NYPD corrupt and untrustworthy at best of times. This is not the best of times."
Daniel took a few paces along the cabin. "Maybe you can strike some sort of deal with them. Hell, look at all the assholes who are still out there because they're working as informants. Surely you can make some sort of truce with each other. Christ, a third of New York has been nuked - your goddamn feud with the cops is pretty inconsequential in light of things, don't you think?"
"No deals. If you want to work with the authorities, do so. As saying goes, it's your funeral. Can go our separate ways."
"Shit. Jesus." Daniel rubbed at his eyes, and stared at the man. "So I have to choose between helping the authorities and helping you, is that it?" He tried to think of a third option, but his mind was numb. And Rorschach probably didn't believe in third options, anyway.
"Simply warning you for your own sake. They won't make things easy."
"This is goddamn ridiculous," Daniel said. "We're at war, for Christ's sake - and you're still running from the police of your own country. I spend years doing all sorts of illegal things, and now I suddenly want to help in a way that's legal, I can't, because you're convinced that everyone's out to get you, and you might be right, because God knows that our public relations are so bad that people still blame us for a riot that happened almost a decade ago, and everyone thinks you're psychotic. I tell you that this might be a good opportunity to repair the bridges that you've been burning for the last twenty years, and you won't hear it, because you're too damn obstinate and, like most paranoiacs, you think that the world revolves around you."
Daniel paused, and realised that Rorschach was staring at him.
"Finished?" said Rorschach, quietly.
Daniel shrugged, and slouched back down in the pilot's chair.
Rorschach hefted his fire axe on to one shoulder, and crouched to scavenge through a bag of supplies. "Settles it, then. We work separately," he said.
"No," Daniel said. Rorschach didn't appear to hear him. "No, we don't," Daniel repeated. "Rorschach..."
Rorschach looked up, eyes narrowed slightly. One of these days, Daniel thought, I'm pretty sure we're going to kill each other, and save the Russians the job.
Daniel rubbed at his temples, and forced a smile. "You saved my life. That means you're stuck with me."
Rorschach remained silent, considering this, then murmured, "Not a paranoiac, Daniel."
Yes, you are. But I think that you have good reason to be. "Sorry, man. I'm just tired, I guess. You are obstinate, though."
The last sentence had meant to come out as a an offhand comment, a glib remark meant to lighten the conversation (Daniel didn't think that Rorschach would ever see obstinacy as a negative trait) but it fell completely flat. Rorschach stared at him again, and Daniel was struck by how wary he looked. There was something in Rorschach's expression that made him look both very old and very young at the same time. It was disconcerting.
For the last ten years, Daniel had switched between feeling pity, fear and irritation towards the man, and he had never once paused to wonder if Rorschach had picked up on it.
Ah, hell.
Daniel leaned back in the pilot's seat, and looked up at the cabin's ceiling. "I'm kind of an asshole today, aren't I?"
"Not necessarily," said Rorschach, terse but contrite. He rose to his feet, leaving the axe and the bag of supplies on the floor, and eyed Daniel silently, poker-faced and pensive. Then he looked away, and paced over to the owlship's open hatch. It opened with a quiet hiss, and Rorschach looked out across the Hudson. Daniel wanted to tell him to shut the door and stop letting all the warm air out of the cabin because it was cold, but said nothing.
The far shore of Edgewater was barely visible through the haze, and the wind created little white crests on the water, but did nothing to disperse the smog. Despite the fact that it was early morning, the world was dark and quiet, like an abandoned movie set, waiting for something. And, as Rorschach regarded the river, Daniel regarded Rorschach. Rorschach seemed to be indifferent or oblivious to the temperature - if anything, he loosened his scarf as if he was too warm, and Daniel found himself looking at the pale, grubby skin on the back of Rorschach's neck.
"How much fuel left?" Rorschach asked.
"Enough to last for a good while," Daniel replied, grateful for the change in topic. He didn't mention that the owlship's current tank of fuel was probably the last that it would ever have, unless he could somehow find enough money and a discreet supplier. That almost went without saying.
"Can still make it to Martha's Vineyard," Rorschach said. He pronounced the quaint name as if it was something reprehensible, and Daniel felt a small spike of amusement.
"No. Like I said, you're stuck with me, and I still need to find Hollis. I guess we can still try to help without getting involved with the authorities - after all, that was how we used to do things, right?"
In retrospect, operating independently of the police and emergency services had never seemed like a particularly efficient way of doing things, but Daniel supposed that it was better than nothing. His biggest concern was that he and Rorschach likely had completely different ideas of what the word 'help' entailed. Rorschach's concept of 'help' usually put people in hospital, and that was if they were lucky.
Daniel thought about it, then added, "...And, hell, I'm going to try to contact Adrian."
Rorschach replied with a grunt, which was eloquent enough to express all that he had to say about Adrian Veidt. However, it was an inescapable fact: Adrian probably had more resources than God. If Daniel couldn't co-operate with the authorities, then he could at least co-operate with Adrian Veidt, who was practically an authority unto himself.
Daniel waited for some sort of resistance from Rorschach, but the other man didn't argue.
And that, at least, felt like progress.
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Author's Note: I'm not sure if the beginning of this chapter was subliminally influenced by Biff's Question Song or not.
Minor nitpicky detail: In chapter 3, Daniel mentioned New York Hosptial - that's been retconned and changed to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, instead. (IRL, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center was renamed to Columbia University Medical Center in 1997, when it became part of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, which used to be two separate hospitals, New York Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital... Er, hence my confusion.)