Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ In the Dark Room ❯ The Green Sorrow of the Grey Coyote ( Chapter 7 )

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

 

A/N: The following is only an omake; in fact, if it were not in the context of this story, it would not be considered Evangelion fanfiction at all. That being said, it is not essential to the main storyline, hence the omake tag. With that in mind, read on…or pass it up. Chapter 7 will be up later in the week. Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

 

 

In the Dark Room Omake: The Green Sorrow of the Grey Coyote

 

By Midnight_Cereal

 

 

He drove.

 

Sitting high in the cabin of his pickup truck, his eyes followed only what the piercing light let him see. High beams cut through what would otherwise have been total blackness, parting the sea of arid darkness like the bow of a cutter. When he passed, the night closed in on the feeble luminescence and devoured it.

 

His face was a stagnant, squalid mask. His steel eyes were a place where things went to die. His mouth, a long flat line, ate those things. Age had carved lines into his brow, his chin, and around the eyes where things went to die.

 

The blue-green glow of the dashboard shone softly on most of his countenance, but not those lines, oh no. There was a darkness there that no artificial light could ever reach.

 

He drove.

 

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She walked. The slight downward slope she hiked caused her to adjust the backpack for the umpteenth time. She blew out a breath in the cool, crisp air, and it was audaciously loud against the sound deprivation that closed in on her as the night had three hours ago. Her left boot scuffed the road; her right kicked a pebble squatting defiantly at the edge of the desert wilderness. She looked out to it, and was met by a blue that flirted with a dozen shades of ebony.

 

Suddenly, her hiccupping laugh carried into the lightless vacuum. Just as suddenly she shut down the manic, unstable sound as she coughed, the involuntary reflex accompanied by a slight fog at her cold lips.

 

She walked.

 

She stopped. She turned around.

 

Behind her, something white and glinting broke laterally and spilled across the distant horizon like milk. Bright, large eyes rose to the crest of the inclined land. They loomed, glowed and gleamed, large and growing larger by the half second.

 

Absently she tugged at the sleeve of her brown jacket and folded her arms across her chest as it approached. She coughed when the light beams stabbed at her corneas, and just for a moment she brought her hand up to shield her green eyes as they adjusted.

 

The thing the light belonged to throttled down as it rolled up and then stopped at her side. It revealed itself to be a truck, red and perhaps a decade old, but no older. Even in the weak light the bed behind the cabin was obviously busy.

 

That wasn't what held her attention. Rather, she stared back at the ghost of her reflection in the window of the passenger side door. There was a low electronic whine as the tempered glass sank into the interior of the door, and she soon was staring at a new face. It was old, and gentle. And smiling.

 

“Gone already, are ya?” he asked.

 

“I…gotta be in Anderton in about an hour. I missed the shuttle.”

 

“Anderton?” He blinked and made a face as he stared out the windshield for a second, then looked back at her questioningly. “Anderton?”

 

“There's a bus there that goes to LAX. It'll only take about forty minutes to walk there. It's only four more miles.”

 

“You can do four miles in forty minutes?”

 

“I can walk fast, Mr. Douglass.”

 

“I can get you there in four minutes.” He grinned like a satisfied grandfather. “Four warm minutes.” He patted the passenger seat. “Let's get you out of that cold, young lady.”

 

She shook her head and smiled apologetically. “Yeah…no. Thanks, though. I'd prefer to walk. Thanks.”

 

“You're gonna walk out here all by yourself? In the middle of nowhere?”

 

“Yeah,” she shrugged tensely.

 

“Oh, you're breaking my heart, Mariko!” he said with feigned hurt.

 

She put a hand to the heart beneath her brown jacket. “Aww, I'm sorry, Mr. Douglass! I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. I'm…just weird like that, you know?”

 

“You're sure? I just saw a coyote out here about a minute ago. Sure you wanna be out here with those things?”

 

“I'm not worried about some little coyote. They don't bother anyone out here anyway, right?”

 

“Well, I don't know. Even if they don't, there're worse things than coyotes, Ms. Buick, all the way out here. A lot can happen in four miles, and I'm just looking out for you.”

 

She opened her mouth to speak, and then shut it with a click. She bit her lip and broke eye contact, staring beyond the headlights, in the direction of Anderton. All that was visible was black foregrounds against black backgrounds. Nothing and nothing, for miles and miles….

 

There was a click as she pulled the handle. The door swung open in a silent arc as she swung her weight into the truck's interior.

 

She smiled. “I guess I should say thanks, then. It was just that I wasn't keen on putting you ou-”

 

She spun away and back in one violent motion, and before the roar from the first round that whizzed past her head faded, he was aiming his pistol at her skull again. She ducked lower, the second slug punching through the side upholstery as if it were wet tissue. He grunted as her leg came around in a blur, catching him under his armpit awkwardly as a third shot rang out and tore through the passenger seat above her left shoulder.

 

Her boot pressed against his ribcage as she pushed off, tumbling out of the passenger compartment in a ragged heap. He groped first at her ankle, then at the gun that had clattered below the glove compartment after she had kicked him.

 

The black-haired teenager wrestled with the strap of her backpack before she shrugged it completely off and jumped to standing. She exploded into the desert night, her first three steps enough to bring her to full speed.

 

There was a crack, another, one more as three more bullets chased after her, kicking up dark blue dust as they all missed their marks. Then a new sound challenged the pounding of her footwear on the arid rocky landscape, and it was the roar of something machine-like. The sound grew in anger and proximity, accompanied by duel beams of luminescence, growing larger and larger as the roar approached her…

 

She leapt to the side as the machine barreled through the space she had occupied a sliver of a fraction of a second previously. She hit the ground with a grunt, rolling and coming to a stop on her back. As she panted, the teenager peered upside down at the back of the vehicle, its brake lights glowing a dull red…

 

…which grew brighter as the truck skidded to a stop and suddenly reversed direction…

 

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He lurched forward violently when the back of the Ford leapt upwards with a deafening metallic crack. It returned to Earth and limped to a stop, and somewhere below him something vital periodically creaked, a sound that shrank in frequency and intensity until it died all together.

 

He pulled at the lock with a grizzled hand, his other occupied with his cold black sidearm. He brought the piece to bear as he bullied the door open with a hard shove. Grunting, he slid out of the seat and to the ground, whipping his head around on a frictionless swivel.

 

Warily, he approached the back of his truck, slowly inching into a crouch. He stopped, listened. Nothing. He abruptly turned to glare at the blackness, ubiquitous but for the high beams at the front of his pickup. Emptiness.

 

He turned back toward his flat-bed. His knees creaked and he wheezed as his crouch deepened. He paused again, tensed, and plummeted the rest of the way down. His shoulder absorbed the shock as he planted a calloused palm. His trigger finger twitched, and he finally aimed the gun at the space beneath the undercarriage.

 

He just barely refrained from blowing himself to kingdom come when a pungent, familiar odor reached his nose, a trickling his ears.

 

But he saw nothing.

 

He stood and whirled once more, faster than a man of sixty-five should be allowed.

 

He saw nothing.

 

The scream of something small and insignificant hurtled through the darkness.

 

Boots scuffing gravel yards ahead of the hood of his truck. He aimed and squeezed twice and the cold steel barked twice, the echo howling and fading soon after.

 

“You think I'm wasting my bullets. Don't you?” he asked the blue-black night. “You should know better. I know I almost plucked your-” He traced a shadowy outline before it lost definition, firing again. “Run, or be still. Keep quiet, or scream like the goddamned lunatic we both know you are, it don't matter. I knew another Ranger older than me, and when he was ninety he capped a sparrow at forty yards. I'm dirt old, but I ain't ninety. And you ain't no damned sparrow.”

 

He heard the scuffing again, but waited. The smell of fuel was stronger. He stepped away from his Ford as if navigating a den of slumbering lions. “Maybe I want you to hear this, anyway. What'd be the point of coming out here for you and shooting you if you didn't even know why? I bet you can guess, can't you?”

 

“You called the police-” and before she could even finish answering he sent a stream of ammunition in the direction of the soft question.

 

“I'm sorry about that, Ms. Buick,” he said with a sick sincerity. “I jumped the gun there. I guess I just really want to kill you.” Almost before the empty metal jacket clattered to the ground he jammed a full magazine into the butt of the black pistol with a swiftness beyond mere instinct.

 

“Jackie never shut up about you,” he claimed. “Always talking about how sweet you were. How you have enough love in you for the whole damned world.” Laughter from him, remorseless and turbulent. “She couldn't even sit down last week, so excited, couldn't wait for her pretty friend from Japan, the one with beautiful green eyes.”

 

A flash of color, white, two pinpoints of emerald. He pulled the trigger. Boom. Boom. Boom.

 

“So to answer your question, no, princess. I didn't get the cops. But when I'm through with you, you'll wish I had.” Boom. Boom. “Jackie said you were a good listener, that people could…confide in you? Can I confide something, sweetheart?”

 

She didn't say yes. She didn't say no, either.

 

“Me and Rosie couldn't have kids of your own. We tried. Lord knows we tried, so He sent us Jackie. Even though she wasn't ours, we treated her like she was every time we saw her, and that was enough. THAT GIRL WAS A LIGHT THAT FILLED ROSIE UP! And I know it was you that put it out. You live out here long enough, you know a rattle snake when you see one.”

 

And then, about twenty yards ahead of him, a shape quickly scuttled low over the soil. He aimed just ahead of it…

 

BOOM.

 

There was the unmistakable cry of pain when it collapsed and tumbled over itself, and it made no sound when its momentum finally halted.

 

“That was for Jackie,” he spat, “you evil bitch.”

 

After a moment of raw silence he headed slowly to the body, though it was no more mobile than the rocks cluttered at his old black boots. The lines around the motionless mass gained definition with each cautious step. He kept the piece low and at the ready, drawing a slow breath as he stalked ever closer. It still did not move as his exhalation crystallized into a translucent white steam. Finally he was there, and he stared.

 

The dead coyote stared back.

 

The air behind him shifted.

 

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He whirled like a man of twenty and she was yet faster as her palm latched onto his approaching wrist like a handcuff. She tilted her head to one side, letting the breath from two bullets blow at a tuft of black hair as they whistled by her. Her grip tightened.

 

He turned fully to give his other fist a clear path to her jaw, but she snatched the strike out of the air with uncanny speed, squeezing the appendage with sickening pressure. He tried to say something, but wheezed instead as he turned all exertion toward resisting her. He gritted his teeth in the weak light, his arm shaking as he tried to overcome the force slowly curling the muzzle toward his abdomen.

 

“You're right about this place, you know?” she said with an abruptness, her voice sharp like a brittle sword. “There are worse things out here. You and me. But I'm not what you say I am.”

 

He snorted like a mad bull and pushed harder. The muzzle was closer. He coughed or yelled, or both, possibly neither.

 

“Don't you make me out to be some heartless, soulless…I do love everyone. I don't…I…” She broke. “YOU DON'T THINK I WAS SICK AFTERWARDS? YOU THINK I WANTED THIS TO HAPPEN?” She blinked furiously in the darkness and took in air with three jagged gulps before she continued.

 

“YOU TELL ME! You think I laughed when I was ripping her open? Or did I puke my guts out, did I cry and gag for HOURS?” The wetness worked its way from her green eyes to her lip, and wavered on it when the flesh trembled. “ANSWER ME!” she screamed. He did by groaning under the precise, relentless, effortless strength that folded his arm in on itself.

 

She squeezed harder. Something in his wrist creaked.

 

“You should have called the police.”

 

And then all at once, the crack of bones and gunfire. He screamed from one and jerked from the other.

 

With a wheeze he sank as the pressure on his crushed wrists dissolved. Yet he clawed at her as though she were a life raft in the ocean of death beginning to drown him. Moisture dripped from her chin as she looked down, and when she gazed upwards at the lightless chasm above her, it ran down her jaw and over her throat before it disappeared from view.

 

One of his damaged, twitching mitts still clawed at her pants leg. He hacked up something vital as he knelt. She acknowledged the groping after a minute by gently removing the pistol from his feeble grasp. Her grip on his forearm was not unlike the jaws of a lion at the nape of her cub's tender neck.

 

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As she pulled him, she looked down and spoke.

 

“She used to talk you up all the time, too, did you know that? She'd never shut up about you, either. But I mean it wasn't just about how nice you were. You think she's just sweet and like your stories.” She shook her head as her green eyes met his grey, glazed ones.

 

“Nah. She wanted you. She told me the things she wanted to do to you…and, I was like, wow, no way. I come back after all these years, and little Jackie grew up. I don't mean to insult you, but that's just a little disturbing to think about, you know?”

 

A bloody, garbled, gurgling moan weakly pushed its way out of his mouth.

 

“Yeah, me too,” she said, looking up. “Here we are.”

 

When they had reached the truck she bent over to grab him by the soaked fibers of his ruined flannel vest. She lifted him as though he were a heavy sack of feathers, hefting him into a sitting position in the driver seat.

 

“She wouldn't want you dying thinking she was some freak.”

 

His head lolled on his rubbery neck as he gurgled once more. She grabbed his face with both hands, turned it until their eyes again locked. “It was how you carried yourself, Mr. Douglass. She didn't care what you were doing, she saw nobility in you. Now, if you had found out about how she felt and took advantage of her, you wouldn't have been very noble at all. But she knew you wouldn't, and she liked you even more because of that.

 

“You have to know she loved that about you. I see it, too…even though you tried to run me over.”

 

She brushed her thumb over and then deeply kissed his bloody lips. Her mouth left his within a minute, and as she pulled away a slight smile graced her features. She freed his head, and it rolled on his shoulders like a nutating disk.

 

“That was for Jackie,” she told him after brushing at her lips with the back of a hand. “Say hi to her for me.”

 

And with that, she shut the door, and stalked toward the road with a long gait…

 

…but not before stopping midway, turning around, extending her arm and aiming the weapon at the end of it beneath the undercarriage, firing once…

 

Once again, there was light that scraped at the edges of the darkness.

 

She walked.

 

And wherever she went, that was the place where things went to die.

 

 

A/N: Let's try this again…Do not take the following seriously…

 

Random A/N:

 

MC: No, this isn't really essential to the story. I don't think so at least. But I had this idea in my head as soon as I finished writing the original. So here it is, mid-week omake, all for you. Now as for me, I'm gonna make good on my pen name. Isn't that right, Box of Frosted Flakes?

 

Frosted Flakes: …

 

MC: I'm so lonely…

 

Next Chapter: Flash…No, really this time.