Moonflower: Chapter Nine

What You Are

08/31/24

Six days until Ring inspection

   “Diana? Diana!” He was shaking the woman violently but her eyes were not opening. “Diana!”

   Smoke and dust from the explosion hid them from the city. Jacob crouched at her side in the haze, bruised from being thrown by the blast, but hurled into action by fear’s sharp sting. Splatters of food and smashed cans from her bag decorated the pavement along with the shredded body parts of the inmate who had unintentionally taken the brunt of the force.

   He shook her harder. “Wake up!”

   “Hmm…” He could see the consciousness fading in and out of her half-lidded eyes, his desperate rocking useless in rousing her.

   “No no no… C'mon, Diana, we have t’move! The creature is comin’! You have t’get up—”

   “Porter!”

   Jacob snapped his head up at his name. Tomás was standing eight feet away in the cloud of dust, rifle locked on the wounded pariah and his dazed keeper. Jacob moved in front of the incapacitated Diana to protect her but the gunman shouted an order for him to freeze. He obeyed, keenly aware of Aaron's intact firearm sitting only a foot from where she lay. He needed that gun.

   “You fucking rat, you're a fucking traitor!”

   Jacob swallowed his panic and pleaded softly. “Tomás, please…”

   “Shut up!”

   The prisoner was trembling, too, the sight of his friend plastered across the street obviously shaking him hard. Jacob refused to look at the gory pieces and appealed to the last good man in Dawson city.

   “J-just hear me out…”

   Tomás gestured between them with the threatening barrel. 

   “So you're running with the prey now, huh?”

   Jacob shook his head. “She-she doesn't know. Please, I'm just tryin’ to get out, I just need t’get out of here, man!”

   “Shut up—”

   “Please Tomás, you know what they'll do t’me if I go back!” He was begging now but the stammered pleading was falling on deaf ears. “Goliath will kill me! I have t’do this, I have to get out of here right now before he finds out I'm still alive!”

   Jacob shifted slightly to his right, the haze floating around his steps as he tried to inch slowly in the direction of the weapon. Tomás stopped him with a furious shout.

   “I said shut the fuck up!”

   Jacob refused to match his raging intensity. “Please, you don't have t’do this.”

   The grip on the inmate's gun became tighter, but his shaky voice was lower now, the foreboding consequence of humanity weighing it down. “You know what happens if I don't, Porter.”

   “Then come with us!” Jacob lowered his hands, holding them in front of him like a desperate prayer. “Get outta the city, we can make it to—”

   “To what, Jacob?!” The rifle sight raised again as he yelled it. That look in his eyes… It was one Jacob had seen every day of his life since he was eight years old—a desperation to justify one's actions. “The world is fucked! There's no winning, no livin’… even if you manage to leave this place, you'll never make it out there. What else were we supposed to do? All the shit we've done, all the killin’? It was us or them! We survived! We need it to survive!”

   Jacob stiffened. That was the exact sentiment that had echoed in his own thoughts, every word dripping with a horrible callousness he had never stopped to recognize until that very moment. Where had the empathy gone that made their souls mortal? He shook his head and his tone softened unconsciously as he reached forward. “Tomás… we… we don't need this. I know no one believes it, but I‐I just think… maybe it doesn't have t’be this way f’us to—”

   “I said shut up!”

   The agitated man wiped his mouth from the spitting words, shaking his head and looking up through knit brows at the object of his anger and his envy. “There's no use for a traitor in Dawson City now.”

   Jacob felt his throat tightening and tears welled in his eyes. “Please, Tomás… I don't wanna die…”

   Tomás lifted his rifle, the unforgiving barrel staring him down on that veiled and lonely street.

   “Goliath will reward me for this.” He set his jaw and harnessed his will. “I'm… I'm sorry, Porter.”

   He reached for the trigger and Jacob braced.

   BANG!

   Tomás dropped to the floor, a red bullet hole shot straight through the center of his chest, dead. Jacob stood stunned for a moment before Diana's croaking groan turned him back to her. She was up, visibly dazed but not enough that she couldn't fire the smoking gun gripped in her shaky hands.

   She shook her head to will away the brain fog and swung the rifle over her back, trying not to look at the two lifeless bodies they had created in the debris on the pavement.

   “We… have to get out of the street. Come on, let's go.”

   He could only stare back. She had heard them.

   Diana had to grab his hand to shift him. “C'mon!”

   She dragged him away from the open air into the skyscraper across the road. Jacob just caught the silhouette of the creature leaping down and mangling Tomás’s corpse before she pulled him into the inner rooms, up countless half-finished stairwells, and into the sky, as far from danger as she could possibly get them.

   Diana's whole body was shivering from the adrenaline of the deed when they finally stopped in the clouds, but she was refusing tears as she checked the firearm’s magazine for bullets. Jacob could no longer bear to look at her.

   She had heard him. There was no fucking way she hadn't—shooting and killing Tomás before he could take them down was undeniable evidence of that. The dread poisoned his veins as he waited there speechlessly for what he knew was coming. She had to have heard the frantic words they had exchanged, and his heart began to race at the epiphany that she now saw his betrayal in the plain light of day—the fatal lie he had peddled since the beginning. She knew that he had been one of the ones responsible for this death trap that they were stuck in the entire time she had been tending to him, feeding him, protecting him. She knew it was his fault.

   He had to say something, anything that might save him now.

   “Ah…”

   The words burned blue flames in his lungs and the syllables couldn't come quick enough as Jacob stood there, stuttering, the rush of panic and searing fear of what she saw swirling inside his stomach like a wildfire, but the desperation to stop it was useless now.

   “Diana please… I didn't, that wasn't…”

   She cocked the gun and looked away from him, her mouth drawn into a tight line. The outline of the deadly blade in her pocket set off his stuttering.

   Shit. No no no no…

   “I was… that wasn't… please, Diana, I… I… I-I had to, I wasn't tryin’ to, but I, I…”

   “Jacob.”

   He was shaking like he was standing before the towering Goliath again. A thousand memories across his entire existence bled into that moment of utter panic, a tsunami of horror drowning his head. “Please, Diana… wait, just wait, I… I have to, I didn't mean—”

   “Jacob,” she turned to face him. He almost fell to pieces as she finally broke this eerie silence with only two firm words from her chapped lips. “I knew.”

   There was a pause.

   “What?”

   “I knew from the start.” Diana's teeth ground tensely as she glanced up, looking backwards in time like she was standing in the rain the moment it had happened. “I saw you up there with the others three weeks ago.” It seemed so long ago now. “You were the one who shot my guide, weren't you?”

   It took tremendous effort for him just to breathe. His shot had gotten that man killed, a scared wanderer who was just trying to help a lost girl look for her family in this terrible city… and she had known it all along. 

   “Yes.”

   She inhaled, the tension like a knife hanging over them both.

   “Stay here.”

   He slowly dropped to the floor and pulled his knees up to his chest in shock, remaining silent as Diana walked out, clanging the heavy metal door closed behind her.

   The evening rain pinged lazily off of exposed steel, the wind carrying a distinctly haunting tune through disintegrating skyscrapers. Despite the fact that he could barely move himself after the effort he had exerted at the train station, Jacob was as hungry as ever when Diana returned. He was just sitting there, bruised and withering away, wasting her time and wasting her resources. His face flushed from the humiliation of his very existence as he avoided the venom of her resentful gaze.

   Four days in the rubble, and only apathy from the prison he used to call home. His conversation at gunpoint with Tomás had confirmed that. Jacob's fists released at his sides as he finally confronted the truth—they were never going to let him leave. They had sacrificed him on that street. While he had chosen to spare one innocent life, they had resolved to abandon him there to be eaten like he was any other corpse, like he meant nothing to anyone… And every moment that came after had only proven that they were right. He was dead weight to this woman, a thorn in her side, a lethal liability.

   His own voice hurled insults in his head that stung his already-wounded heart. You're worthless, useless, nothing.

   He heard her fall beside him, breathing heavily as she plopped the heavy backpack down in front of them and flipped the lid open. Neither of the two broken souls spoke or turned to look at the other.

   She signed heavily.

   “I didn't want to shoot him.”

   Jacob's arms pulled his legs closer to him. “He would've shot us.”

   “I know.” She breathed out steadily, feeling the weight of what she had realized was worthy to protect. Her voice sounded more intense when she spoke again. 

   “I'm sorry they left you there.”

   He knew what she was referring to. That lonely street by the subway entrance where he had been left for dead before being discovered by her, the guardian angel he never deserved. His hands fell around his knees, holding them lightly as he listened to the misty rain delicately falling outside of their safe haven.

   You didn't deserve rescue.

   He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that finally coming clean could heal him inside somehow, but a potent shame and regret were all that was left in the wake of his lies. 

   “I'm sorry I didn't tell you.”

   “I can see why you didn't.” She tucked her dark hair behind her ears and fiddled with the backpack cover, a pent-up, angry air lingering around her. “Jacob… How could you do all of those horrible things, and with people like those men? It's… inhuman.” She still wouldn't look at him. “How could you stomach it? You got innocent people killed. You killed people.”

   The tears brimming in his eyes eclipsed him. They dripped down his face as he tucked his knees into his chest, making himself small. For the first time since the day they met, he would be answering her truthfully. “I had nowhere else t’go.”

   “You could've run, gone outside the city.” The notes in her voice were strained and careful, searching for a reason, some kind of morality where there was none to find. “Done anything but offer up real people who were just trying to survive to keep yourself alive.”

   The silence compounded his sins on top of his back. 

   “I could've, I just…” The word wavered on his tongue. “…didn't.”

   All that death, all that suffering. It felt pathetic to try and justify anything anymore but he was still trying desperately to keep the shredded strings of his actions—his very personhood—tied together.

   “I felt I wouldn't live, I-I didn't think I could make it on my own. How could I survive a day out there with those creatures?” he confessed, feeling the remorse stretch him to the breaking point. “No one else could, the world was dead in a week a-and I'm so fuckin’ useless, I can't even fight! I… I was scared.” 

   There was a pause.

   “Tomás seem scared too.”

   “Everyone in Dawson is,” Jacob admitted in a low, monotone voice. “That's why they follow him. Fear. There used t’be three hundred of us, now there's barely a third of that. Goliath never gave a shit about anyone… I dunno why I expected it t’be any different f’me.” The words he had needed to say for weeks finally formed in his dry mouth. “I'm sorry.” It was a relief to speak them, but the shame of complicity had no cure—it never would.

   You ruined everything—you always do.

   The quiet storm filled their silence, its soft ambiance setting a surprisingly peaceful atmosphere to the ruins that composed this maze of a city bathed in tragedy. He could see its man-made borders lining the green outside world only a mile away from where they cowered—almost near enough to touch, but just out of reach. So close yet still so far.

   You deserve to to be left behind.

   “We're getting out of here.”

   The wind could hide a lot, but it couldn't distort the power in her statement. He turned, watching as Diana gazed intently into the open pack before them, her hands clenched firmly around the rim.

   “I promise.”

   What?

   He just stared at her, Jacob's astonishment rendering him speechless. Despite the truth finally coming out, despite every unforgivable thing he had been allied with over these past four years of torture, she was still holding on, her grip on him—her impossible burden—as strong as her hands on that pack. What could he say to that?

   “You'd… still take me with you?”

   Diana did not move. She repeated it evenly, reinforcing her oath in strength and certainty. 

   “I promise I'm getting us out of here.”

   Jacob was in disbelief. “You can't promise that—”

   “Then I promise I'll try!”

   Their eyes finally met, deep brown and pale blue communicating what words could not. Her expression was full of an earnest anger and a steely determination. Before he could speak she had placed a reassuring hand on his arm, squeezing just above his scar like it was the lifeline she would never let go of.

   “Nobody gets left behind. Not in my book.”

   He didn't know why, but looking into her dark, wide eyes… he felt a sliver of hope flicker to life inside him. It was faint, just a glimmer, like the light from a distant star. Could he ever accept something so unearned?

   Jacob hesitated, the fear still screaming why inside of him. “I'll slow you down.”

   She nodded honestly in full acceptance of that fact. “Probably.”

   This wasn't right, it wasn't what he deserved. The purity of kindness he had nearly forgotten existed shone bright in her as he held his trust above her willing hands, ready to release, but just not able to finally let go of the past. The cosmos of blame was trapping him in place. He didn't trust it, but deep inside, he knew he wanted to.

   “Diana, I'm… I…”

   “You don't have to say it, Jacob.” The rain washed away the guilty pain between the two survivors as the strength of her grip eased, a gentleness in her eyes gazing back at him in the misty twilight. The raw clarity in her voice silenced the doubting words in his head. “You are not just one moment, but also the next. What is Jacob Porter going to do now?”

   Jacob inhaled and held that breath in the quiet. This life—this broken existence—it was shattered, but it was his… and this was his choice. His nod was more vulnerable than he had ever been as the resolve to earn his place at her side rose like a blazing sun in his chest.

   “I'll try.”

   The promise comforted them both, the fragile calm returning between the two wanderers. Jacob exhaled steadily, even managing a small, weak smile. It was all he could give. Diana matched it with courage, her face almost glowing with a transparent sincerity, something he had never seen in anyone before that day.

   She let his arm go and tied up her empty bag, leaning back as the night came in. Her expression was determined once again. “There's one more hurdle to go, and we're going to need to trust each other more than ever if we're going to make it out of this city.”