Running From Himself 3-27B (Patreon)

Water snapped from the barrel as the muzzle jumped, elbows flexing as the pistol grip punched backward hard enough to sting. A hard little push against his face and chest, like someone had slammed a door right in front of him, pressing through the cold wetness of his shirt. 

His forearms shook against it, all that force and — and the sound… 

For a second, all he heard was ringing, hearing flattened under one long thin eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee- “AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!”

What… Hughie blinked under the falling rain, drops breaking against the pavement, striking his shoulders and mixing with the smoke off the tip of the Mossberg. Yet, none of that mattered as his eyes dropped down to the supe that went down screaming.The wide look in the skinhead’s eyes said as much as his open mouth, Hughie every bit as surprised as he was. Even still, only one of them was screaming raw and high and panicked and, for once in his life, it wasn’t Hughie Campbell.He could barely hear any of it though, Hughie’s breath closer than everything else as he looked at the mess of a hole low in the supe’s back.

It was moving — red meat pulling against meat, white visible underneath it in a shattered mess as torn edges reached toward each other. “Wait—!” Those tattoos kept flickering, the blue from before fighting for life as Roknar screamed on the ground.Black Noir hadn’t screamed.

Even after Hughie had emptied a whole magazine into the dark specter back on Long Island, he had gotten absolutely nothing for it. Standing there with a hot rifle and a dry mouth, he might as well have thrown loose gravel at a parked car for all it did.Roknar, though… “J-just—”Roknar screamed.

Roknar bled.Roknar dragged his legs on the ground as he twisted back to look over his shoulder. “Wait, man…”

His hands moved on their own; right tightening its grip as his left worked the action and kicked a spent shell free. The brass base flashed once before vanishing under the rain, water slipping from his hair as Hughie raised the shotgun again.

“J-just wai-!”

Another shot rang out before the hole could close, the force of the slug rolling the supe onto his side. Hughie was already walking forward, hands doing the work steadier than they had been for almost a week now.Which was definitely something he’d have to deal with. Later.Roknar was still dragging himself across the asphalt, legs twitching as his elbows and arms did all the work. One boot scraped behind him, a single leg starting to answer the signals.Hughie shot him again, a laugh spilling out as the gun bucked in his hands. He barely caught it as Roknar screamed again, the sound leaving him like a hiccup — no warning, no permission.This is-  He caught it that time, laughing louder as his eyes dropped to Roknar’s tattoos; the glow sputtered a bit brighter, flesh stitching faster as the gun went up one more time. “This is way better than Noir.”Roknar got a knee under himself.It blew apart the second he put weight on it, a slug shredding flesh and sending more gore to wash away under the rain. Fingers fumbled a shell, the thing rolling down a storm grate, but Hughie managed to fit the rest in just fine. Just fine… His gut wasn’t feeling all that fine, recoil battering him in a way he’d regret tomorrow, but it didn’t matter.Another shot rang his ears.Nothing else mattered as Hughie cut the supe back down one more time, a scream clashing against a laugh.Every time enough of the man came back together to matter, Hughie had the simple job of making him suffer for that. Because that’s all it was; not killing him, because Hughie doubted he even could, but never letting him find his feet.The van creaked to Hughie’s right, the wreckage of metal squealing as Kimiko finally found her own feet. Well, kinda…

One of her legs was still bent back but the small supe clearly didn’t care much about the bone sticking halfway out as she threw herself onto Roknar’s back.Roknar came off the ground as Kimiko lifted him high, the supe clawing at her as he thrashed like a wild animal; desperate and angry. None of it worked, her hold on him tighter than ever.

Mouth wide open, Kimiko’s scream was as silent as Roknar’s wasn’t, the Japanese supe pulling with all her strength until something tore. More blood sprayed under the rain, Hughie splattered from face to chest as Roknar fell to the ground again. A bare second later, two ragged forearms splattered at the still-screaming supe’s sides, stumps spurting strong.Hughie closed the last few feet, Kimiko stepping aside as she spotted him advancing.Pain-dazed eyes looked up at the shotgun, then Hughie’s face.

There it was again.

Fear.Actual fear, a lot of it too, a look Hughie remembered aimed at him over a year ago now from the face of one ‘invisible cunt’. The gun didn’t lower as that memory slid back into place, the former AV store clerk reminded that he’d only ever killed one person his entire life.It wasn’t anything close to the ‘heat of the moment’ like he tried to convince Butcher and the rest before. Hughie hadn’t been ‘scared out of his mind’ either.

There’d been time.

Plenty of it, from the moment Translucent had talked him down and put a hand on his shoulder before walking off. Hughie had stood in that abandoned kitchen and thought about it, about who he wanted to be, and if he really wanted to do it.The answer was clear as day.By the time his thumb tightened around that detonator, the invisible man had never seen it coming.

He’d lost surprisingly little sleep over it too.

Almost none at all, which was crazy. He’d even tried to push a little more about what else he could do, until Mother’s Milk had talked him down a bit. 

‘You wanna know what’s really messed up?’ Hughie remembered swallowing his own spit in the back of that van last year, eyes on Mother’s Milk as he confessed. ‘In that moment, it felt kinda good.’

That rush under his skin…

It was right there again, here and now, as he put the steaming muzzle in Roknar’s mouth.

The first shot rang as loud as all the others, Hughie firing again as the body still twitched under him. By the third, the mess of flesh underneath was still trying to repair a broken body, tattoos guttering, and somewhere around the fourth the skull came apart and stayed apart.Hughie breathed heavy, barrel pointed down at red-splattered pavement, well aware Kimiko’s eyes were on him.A second later, that awareness shifted to the fact he was still laughing.

Mouth closing, Hughie swallowed under that stare and found somewhere else to put his eyes before answering back. “...what?”A scream further down the block gave Hughie an excuse to look away as Skandia finally made it to the crushed car. The spear-throwing supe came down beside it, knees hitting pavement hard enough that Hughie winced from a hundred feet away. The woman didn’t seem to care, though, her bare hands tearing at folded metal.“Galdar!” She called a name into a crushed roof that wasn’t answering her. Those thin fingers tried to get under the edge of the roof and peel the folded metal apart, gold constructs even jammed into the seams like levels as she kept screaming that name. “Gabriel, baby, answer me—!”

"Skandia. Skandia. Break off an—!”“He’s under here!”Norska hovered behind her daughter for a few seconds before tearing off as the sky cracked a bright purple again under dark clouds.

Hughie shook his head. "...Jesus."

"Zey are falling apart." Frenchie came up beside him, rifle in hand, Mother’s Milk on the other side. "Look. Look at zem."

Hughie couldn’t deny that much, shaking his head again. A few dozen feet from where Skandia was crying, Thrymr was still lying where Maeve had left him, the man barely breathing but still bleeding. Vikor kept bellowing under a four or so Rojos dogpiling him while Norska kept trying to be in four places at once, fighting around the dozen or so Rojo’s left from the three dozen that had started this fight.

Then the street shook again.A cloud of concrete dust went building-high as Maeve stomped through it with blood at one corner of her mouth, looking less hurt than simply inconvenienced.“Big man, huh?”The Rojos around Vikor took one look at the returned Seven member and ran for it, leaving the hammer-wielding man alone as Maeve swung first.Both he and her went through a building, Hughie losing sight of everything except the aftermath.

Norska screamed out and dove for the building, Skandia up beside her. Kenji clipped her flight path, debris knocking mother into daughter, and — while they were both correcting — Annie stepped out and caught both from the other side with a blast that sent both women spiraling down the other end of the street.Hughie stood there in the rain with a half-emptied shotgun, rain in his eyes as he looked up at another crack of thunder. The sky over Queens had left storm behind a little bit ago, yellow branching through cloud cover in long lines agains streamers of bright purple.

With another loud crack, a blast of purple-white went off like a bomb.Yellow went out like a light all at once and Hughie watched a woman drop out of the sky.“...oh, shit.”