When the last barricade falls, Syndi can feel it. It's in the quality of the screams, the sounds of shifting debris. Something is coming to an end.
Her Miss Tornado Day sash, once a blinding satiny white any bride could be proud of, is fraying, grubby, and caked with gore. She slips out of it and unpicks the knot holding the two ends together.
Part of her is glad that Marshall can't see this, sure that he'd offer up some smart-alecky comment as she pushes sweat-damp hair off her face and keeps it there with a John Rambo-style bandana fashioned from a ribbon that once marked her out as a sacrifice for a sentient tornado.
Part of her wishes he was here anyway.
And another part of her wonders if she should have gone to Old Bob, when she was seventeen and her year was up, when the town chose a new Miss Tornado Day and she'd been sent out into the cyclone to die. Things might have turned out differently. For her, for the people she loved, even for Eerie.
If Marshall was here, she'd ask him about becoming the Harvest King. About the mountain and the wolf that howled in the night, and whether blood spilled under an October moon might have prevented all of this.
If he was here with her, hiding in the ruins of the Eerie Bingo Parlour, she would ask him whether it might have been worth it.
The tombola drum near the western windows begins to spin, slow at first, a handful of human teeth inside clicking against the rusting metal. Syndi reaches for the last remaining incendiary device - homemade hand grenades fashioned from stripped-down bingo dabbers and some sort of fruit cordial she'd discovered at the very back of the Parlour's walk-in refrigerator, covered in warning stickers and pulsating faintly.
Outside in the dark, something moves. The room she's in is three floors up, but the Garbage Men know how to climb. She'd seen them swarming like lizards over the surface of City Hall, the living surface of the building twitching and flinching at every touch.
She didn't blame it. In it's place, she'd have torn out her own foundations to avoid those clammy, grasping hands. Of course, in a very real way, the Garbage Men had already done that for her.
Syndi flicks open Janet's lighter and steps towards the glass.
Ongoing Verse: The Children( Read more... )Ongoing Verse: Milkman( Read more... )Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History( Read more... )![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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froodle
