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solivar · 3 months ago

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Ghost Stories On Route 66

Chapter Four

The UMN annex was four hoverbus transfers and one short stretch on the rapid pedestrian transit speedwalk which, this time at least, did not result in any form of grievous bodily harm, not even a bit of unscheduled nipple-surfing across the raked-stone-and-succulent-beds lawn at his point of exit. Given that his last trip out to the annex had resulted a) missing the exit, b) attempting to return to the exit by the expedient method of hopping over the lane separator, and c) being sent to the hospital via ambulance because having one foot going one direction and one foot going the other direction and each moving at roughly twice the average human walking speed was a recipe for tragedy, he considered this at least an unqualified success. In his own defence, the last time he traveled out to the annex was also his first, carrying Zenyatta’s forgotten lunch since he was the one who didn’t have any scheduled classes or studio time or anything resembling work that day, and had not expected what he found upon arrival. In the world of his childhood, buildings called “annexes” were either ancient, crumbling cinderblock-and-sheet-metal edifices that would probably exist until an earthquake strong enough to topple them came along or else post-Crisis modular prefabs of recycled and poorly insulated plastics meant to be replaced by more permanent construction but which never seemed to rate high enough on anyone’s priority queue to quite get there.

This annex, by way of cruel and distracting contrast, was a Pueblo Deco Revival architectural masterwork purpose designed and built as a showcase piece for the style, as well as to house the off-campus professional enrichment classrooms and offices for the chosen few among the faculty. His research, conducted while he was spending six weeks with his left leg in a full immobilization brace, suggested that being assigned space there was generally the result of a member of the faculty either dying or moving on and the survivors engaging in the sort of academic heft/staff seniority knife fights only spoken of in shellshocked whispers by TAs and adjuncts who’d had the misfortune of witnessing them first hand. That Tekhartha Zenyatta, known by all for his thoroughgoing gentleness and fundamentally mild nature, occupied a prime chunk of that real estate suggested that his publish-or-perish game was thoroughly on point or he knew where a substantial number of bodies were buried and probably both. His office was a second-floor corner, not quite as desirable as some spaces, significantly more desirable than others, gifted with more than adequate storage and sitting space as well as enormous windows in two of the four walls and a view of the city and the mountains beyond that could genuinely be described as a vista.

Zenyatta was sitting at his desk, silhouetted against said vista, when Hanzo arrived, having missed him in the classroom by a double handful of minutes, and knocked on the frame of the open door. He looked up and never was the praying mantis resemblance more acute than when the westering sun caught the shaved curve of his skull and the highlights in his hazel eyes as he blinked a slow and vaguely astonished blink at the apparition that appeared before him. Hanzo held up a thermos. “I have soup.”

Zenyatta smiled and his eyes glinted with unconcealed humor. “And this time emergency services were not involved in the delivery. Come in, my friend.”

Hanzo stepped inside and closed the door behind him. By the time he turned around, Zenyatta had retrieved two bowls from the depths of his desk and shut down the holoscreens of its internal workstation. Hanzo sat, and poured, the soup still warm enough to steam, and a for a moment the sat together in companionable silence and drank.

“Ah.” Zenyatta finally said. “Grandmother Sumiko’s miso soup recipe. Never tell your brother this, but I am of the opinion that no one in the household makes it better than you.”

“You flatter me.” Hanzo replied, but couldn’t help the smile that grew across his face. “And I would never break my brother’s heart that way, I assure you.”

A warm chuckle. “I hope you do not mind me saying it, but you also have the look about you of a man who wishes to unburden himself without having to spend the next two hours talking his excitable, wildly overprotective little brother out of shipping him back to Japan tied up in a crate marked live cargo, do not taunt .”

“You...are not even a little bit wrong about that,” Hanzo admitted, and set his bowl down. “I -- “

He opened his mouth to speak, and for a long, long, horrifyingly long moment, absolutely nothing came out. Zenyatta’s pale silver brows, always startling against his dark skin, rose questioningly as he finished drinking his soup and set the bowl aside. Hanzo closed his mouth, breathed deeply, exhaled, breathed deeply again, and found words absolutely failing to emerge from his word-making hole despite the ardent desire burning beneath is breastbone to expel the tale of every weird-ass thing that had happened to him over the last four days, unpleasant, pleasant, and enjoyment-neutral. His throat worked fruitlessly with the effort to produce them, his brain chased itself in fully coherent narrative circles, but the only thing to emerge from his throat was a thin, wheezy whine not entirely unlike the pitiful utterance of a woodwind whose reed was so hopelessly saturated with saliva it was utterly incapable of effective vibration. With a wordless moan of despair, he collapsed against Zenyatta’s desk and buried his head in his arms.

“I have the sense,” Zenyatta said, gently, “that this is not something you have done very often. Or perhaps at all. Ever.”

Hanzo found he could not raise his head from his arms and so he lifted a hand in a complex gesture he hoped Zenyatta would interpret as agreement.

“Would it, perhaps, be easier for you if I asked questions?” Again, oh so very gentle.

“...Maybe?” From the depths of his defensive stronghold, Hanzo managed to force out a response.

“Very well.” Zenyatta’s tone became, if anything, even more serene. “I understand that you intended to visit Shiprock. Was it all that you expected it to be?”

“...Yes.” He very much wished, at that moment, to wax rhapsodic at length, to utter self-condemnatory words for never having visited sooner, despite having the time to do so more than once over the years, to describe how it was impossible to fully appreciate the place in all its stark beauty without standing in the cool of its shadow, and settled for croaking into the crook of his arm, “I’ll show you the pictures when we get home.”

“Hanzo, my friend, are you comfortable with this? We can stop if -- “

“No,” Hanzo muttered, lifting his head enough to catch a glimpse of Zenyatta looking down at him, naked concern on his face. “No -- I wish to continue. Please.”

“As you wish.” Zenyatta leaned slightly closer, his hands folding together atop his desk in a fashion Hanzo was inclined to call mudra-ish. “I also understand that you intended to visit the Omnic graveyard in that area, as well. May I ask why? The two goals seem entirely divergent from one another.”

“Part of my Visual Thesis.” Hanzo admitted to the surface of Zenyatta’s desk. “A...comparison and contrast between natural forms of desolation -- the desert, particularly now that winter is approaching -- and the wreckage left behind by the collapse of modern civilization, the towns abandoned during the Crisis and never reoccupied, the scars left behind by hubris and war. I thought the graveyard, and the town closest to it, which was also called Shiprock, would make a striking example.”

“I tend to agree.” A little smile touched the corners of Zenyatta’s mouth. “I would very much enjoy seeing those photographs, I think, and to visit the your thesis exhibition next spring.”

“Iwillmakecertainmyadvisorhasyouonthelist.” He could feel all the blood evacuating his extremities and heading directly to his face and so he positioned his otherwise useless hands to hide it as much as possible. “The whole experience left me feeling...melancholy. There was -- there is -- an intrinsic sadness to the whole thing, even now, thinking of how much death and destruction could have been avoided, how much more could have been done in the aftermath, the appalling waste of it all.”

And now was the weird part. Where the emphatically Not Normal stuff began. He could feel the urge to beg Zenyatta’s forgiveness for wasting his time welling up in his throat and the even stronger urge to stand up and flee even if it meant risking death or dismemberment on a snow-slicked speedwalk taking up residence in his legs, pleading with him to retreat from what was certain to be a scene of pure humiliation. You should really spare your brother’s boyfriend the necessity of calling the hospital and having you admitted for psychiatric evaluation -- that’s the sort of thing that can put a strain on even the best relationships, a little voice that seemed to partake of rationality murmured in the back of his mind, seduction spiked with reproach because, really, what kind of asshole would do that to Zenyatta? He absolutely did not have to be forced to make that sort of judgment call and --

“And then where did you go?” Zenyatta’s voice, warm and smooth as oil, poured through the cracks in his internal monologue and caused how now-slippery thoughts to skid away like an unsteady but enthusiastic two year old on a particularly lubricious skating rink.

“Cerrillos,” Hanzo blurted out, before the voice of rationality could reassert itself. “Well -- eventually. This is where things become...strange. Very, very strange. I would humbly ask that you listen first and then, if you think me thoroughly irrational afterwards, we can discuss...options?”

Zenyatta’s hands lifted away from the table and took on a second, even more mudraish posture just below his chin. “Agreed. Though I should also tell you that, having lived and worked here for a number of years my standards for strange are quite liberal.”

“My car’s GPS began malfunctioning even before I left the vicinity of the graveyard -- I believe I was technically still within Shiprock town limits.” He retrieved the second thermos and jiggled it gently; Zenyatta brought out two tea bowls this time, and he poured for them both. A few sips and he was fortified to continue. “It refused to hold the route I indicated. I had to reset it several times and it misdirected me all over the hills until I reached what used to be Route 14, where it showed me a course back to Santa Fe from the south. The car itself was sputtering for miles and it finally died completely just after I made that turn.”

“I have heard of this sort of thing before from both students and colleagues.” Zenyatta informed him, meditatively. “Global positioning devices frankly refusing to function properly in certain regions south of the city, that is. The theories I have heard in relation to why this may be tend to extremes to say the least.”

“Oh?” Hanzo asked, somewhat more warily than he liked.

A certain mischievous sparkle came into Zenyatta’s eyes. “The most reasonable suggest some form of localized, persistent geomagnetic disturbance in the Earth’s atmosphere, though how such a thing could both exist and completely defy conventional forms of detection is a debate all by itself. Some of the others...well. Roswell is only two hundred miles away, and well within the observed radius of GPS disturbances.”

“Roswell?” Hanzo asked, blankly this time.

The mischievous sparkle was now a mischievous gleam . “Aliens, my friend. Visitors from another world. One of my students is involved in the production of a journal of amateur UFOlogy and swears with a great deal of passionate conviction that the United States government has been covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life since a vehicle not of this world crashed in Roswell in the late 1940s.”

“I...believe I read about that at some point.” Hanzo leaned back in his chair. “A crashed weather balloon?”

“A crashed nuclear test observation balloon that spawned thousands of conspiracy theories, some of them more plausible than others.” He shook his head slightly. “But I agreed to listen first. Please...continue.”

“Yes. Uhm.” And now came the Really Incredibly Strange Parts and before his rational mind could start whispering helpful advice, he pushed himself all the way up into a normal sitting position, gripped the armrests of his chair and said, “I think there were coyotes. Actual real, living coyotes. At least one. When the car died, it was almost dark -- the road I was on barely existed on the GPS and from what I could see it wasn’t traveled regularly at all. My cell had no reception, not even the emergency contact signal. I knew that waiting wasn’t really an option, so I gathered my things and began walking north along Route 14. I saw their eyes from a distance at the edge of my light and for at least a few hours, I was convinced I was going to be eaten.”

A smile curled Zenyatta’s mouth, but he mercifully said nothing.

“I reached Cerrillos -- I want to say near midnight? I lost track of time while I was walking. It was cold, I was exhausted, and at first I didn’t realize I was looking at real lights, an occupied building. The ranger’s...station, I should probably say, but it was more like just a house? I think he’s lived there a long time, is what I’m saying. He took me in and I sort of passed out on his couch and the next morning he gave me breakfast and can I just say that if you and he got into a gently soothing smile contest, I am legitimately unsure who would win? He’s just so -- “ Hanzo’s hands, he realized with dawning horror, had released their grip on the armrests through no conscious direction of his own and started talking for themselves; he hastily stuffed them under his thighs. “ Anyway , the next day he took me to my car to see if anything could be done for it and there was...something...more than one something...not a coyote...lurking around it. Nearby. We heard them first -- they howled, like a pack of animals communicating with one another.” He found he could recall that hideous, unearthly sound with horripilating intensity, a shudder running the length of his body as he did so, and Zenyatta’s sympathetic listening face took on a hint of genuine alarm. “Jesse -- that’s the ranger’s name, Jesse McCree -- told me to get back into our vehicle and as we were driving away there was something else , something louder and closer and I --”

The sensation that gripped him now was less a shudder than a convulsion as, for an instant, he nearly remembered what he saw -- the outline, the contour, the texture, the stomach-churning awareness that none of those things were born of any sane world, or even the one they both now occupied, and he deeply regretted everything he’d eaten thus far that day. He clamped his jaw and his eyes shut and swallowed hard and, as he did so, a pair of warm hands cradled his face. At a vast distance, he heard Zenyatta saying his name. With an almost superhuman effort, he forced his eyes to open and ground out, “I saw it. Something unnatural. It saw me, too, and it tried -- “

“It tried to devour your soul.” Zenyatta finished it for him.

“How -- ?” Hanzo croaked, not quite certain how many possible permutations of that question he actually meant, but he knew it was more than one.

“Did I know?” The kindly smile had a slightly sad tinge to it. “I sensed the change in you when you returned home last night, but I wasn’t certain how or when to approach you about it. Your spirit has always been wounded, for as long as I have known you, but this is...more. Not so deep nor so old but more immediately serious. Your soul was severed from your flesh?”

“Yes,” Hanzo croaked again, his stomach still seriously considering rebellion and his mind now beginning to get in on the uncivilized revolution action. “ How -- ?”

“The ranger saved you? He must have, he was the only one close enough to do so. How...unusual.” Zenyatta’s eyes gleamed again, almost with a light of their own, golden welling up from beneath gray and green. “And he protects you still. I can see his aegis wrapped around you like a cloak of crimson and gold, holding you while you heal, hiding you from...the thing that saw you.”

“Really?” It came out sounding horribly, pathetically needy and he tried to cringe away, but Zenyatta refused to relinquish his hold.

“Yes.” The smile that curved his lips held more than a trace of impishness; Hanzo found that bizarrely comforting. “I would like to meet this ranger of yours. Other professional craftworkers are so hard to find outside the specialized academic sphere, and those assholes would never dirty their hands with actually rescuing someone.”

“I’d like to see him again too,” It was nothing more or less than utter honesty and it fell out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“Excellent. We shall have to make a day of it.” Gently. “Can you stand? Walk?”

Hanzo tested his legs and found his knees wobbly but not so much he wouldn’t risk getting out of the chair. “I think?”

“Good, because I am not certain I could carry you.” Zenyatta leaned back, resting on the edge of his desk. “I realize this has been several sorts of shock to you, my friend. I will do what I can to help ameliorate that, and assist in your recovery however I am able.”

“He gave me a medicine. A kind of tea? It’s supposed to help.” Hanzo took a deep breath, forced his racing thoughts to slow, and then to organize themselves into at least one coherent utterance. “Professional craftworkers?”

“A term of relatively modern provenance, I must admit.” Zenyatta reached out and grasped his hand gently. “I understand that you were, in essence, studying to be part of our kindred order once.”

Hanzo swallowed with some difficulty, his own grip involuntarily tightening. “ Oh. ”

“Yes.” He glanced out the western window at the sunset beginning to blossom in scarlet glory over the city. “We should go home -- it’s my night to cook, after all. If it is not objectionable to you, I would like to examine the medicine you were given?”

“Of course.” Hanzo replied, numbly, feeling as he did so the ache of that older wound again, for the first time in ages. “Genji. Did he...did he tell you what…”

“No.” Zenyatta’s smile softened into something close to sorrow again. “Only that you left your path for reasons of your own. We may discuss that also, if you wish.”

“No.” It came out more curtly than he wished and he squeezed Zenyatta’s hand in apology. “No -- I...do not wish to...visit that again. Not right now.” Never , whispered that silent ache, and he pushed himself slowly to his feet. “I...would like to be home before dark, if we could.”

“Of course.”

The best part about Zenyatta cooking was that Zenyatta actually cooked . Rather than engaging in a forty-odd-minute long debate among five individuals with wildly divergent tastes that would end in an obscenely expensive take-out order, he very simply ignored the divergent tastes and made something that everyone would invariably sit down to eat and subsequently enjoy. Hanzo himself hadn’t quite mastered that art but considered himself learning at the knee of the master every time he was asked to assist and thus he had no objection to being handed a knife and a cutting board almost as soon as they arrived home. He sat and cut carrots into rounds while Zenyatta retrieved the containers of marinating chicken (for the meat-eaters) and marinating tofu (for the non-meat-eaters) from the refrigerator and set them out to reach room temperature; he chopped garlic and minced fresh ginger while Zenyatta toasted a few handfuls of shelled peanuts and set them aside to cool; he diced onion while Zenyatta heated the oil in both their large skillets and added aromatic spices that perfumed the air. The tension bled from him as they worked, Zenyatta adding half the onion to each pan, and he rose to do what dishes he could as basmati rice and water went into the cooker. Moment by moment the soothing rituals of the kitchen worked their magic on him and he found the words flowing out.

“There was something else -- something I didn’t tell you at the office. Once when I was at the ranger’s house and when I returned home last night, I...traveled outside my body.” Saying it aloud had the effect of solidifying the reality of it in his own mind and silencing the almost-continuous mutters of reason in the back of his skull that were advocating voluntarily committing himself. “Well. All right. I know I did it at the ranger’s house. Last night might have been an extraordinarily vivid and detailed dream, but I doubt it sincerely.”

Zenyatta carefully added the chicken and its marinade to one of the pans and gave it a few quick stirs. “That does not entirely surprise me. Your soul’s attachment to its flesh is attenuated at the moment, likely moreso when you sleep.”

“The ranger suggested as much -- the medicine is supposed to help with that, I think. It made me so tired when I took it last night I barely made it up the stairs.” He accepted the container Zenyatta handed to him and made it clean. “I...may have witnessed a conversation I probably should not have heard.”

“Oh?” Zenyatta glanced at him, sidelong, and repeated his process with the second container, tone and manner perfectly neutral.

“When I was...sleepwalking...last night. Possibly this morning. Maybe both? Anyway, ” Hanzo scrubbed savagely at the second container for a moment, “I went back to his house -- I am not entirely certain why -- but I felt as though I woke there, on the couch. His parents were waiting for him, but they did not seem to be aware of my presence, and when he returned home he was not aware of it, either. They discussed a number of topics that were somewhat outside my realm of experience -- things I would appreciate your assistance in researching, if you would be amenable to doing so?”

“Of course. I have always been of the opinion that ignorance is not an outstandingly effective shield.” The very faintest hint of a smile as he added rice and carrots and ginger and peanuts to a third pan. “Particularly when dealing with the naturally curious artistic types. Would you mind setting the table and summoning the others? We’ll be ready to eat in a few minutes.”

Everyone in the house had their favorite plate, glass, set of silverware, and chair, no single piece of it matching any other piece, reflective of the fact that they all brought at least a handful of household goods when they moved in together. The blender/food processor belonged to Hana -- she used it to produce gallons of fruity homemade energy smoothies containing approximately four times the amount of caffeine permitted in commercially salable beverages which she fed to the rest of the game design faculty and students on a fairly regular basis, particularly in the vicinity of midterms and finals. In fact, her entire friendship with Genji came about as a result of his raging addiction to the Random Mystery Fruit variety of the same and his invitation to move in with them in order to shorten the supply chain. Lucio brought the living room sound system, which replaced the fairly dinky speakers that came with their holotank and turned the entire room into a nearly hallucinatory sensory experience when it was running full-tilt, a circumstance usually reserved for family game nights and movie marathon weekends when the nearest neighbors were away, because otherwise someone would be forced to continue the ongoing battle of the passive-aggressive complaints to their landlord, who had absolutely no fucks to give so long as they paid the rent on time and didn’t actually violate any local sound-related ordinances. From childhood on, Genji had owned every game system known to man and some that were entirely experimental products of the family’s active immersion entertainment products division -- he’d bought them all again, once he’d come to the United States, and still received regular care packages from AIE of tech and games that needed thorough testing. Zenyatta had actually brought the majority of the common-use furniture, including the kitchen table and chairs and the living room set, all of which had a rather distinct character of their own, and that character was probably the offspring of an aromatherapist, a medical cannabis dispensary, and a polyamorous hippie commune.

Hanzo supplied the pots and pans, because man in general and he in specific couldn’t live on delivery alone.

The sounds drifting down the stairs told him the rest of the household was, indeed, home and also that merely calling up to them was unlikely to jar them from their pursuits. Instead, he found his tablet, queued up the standard dinner summons, and deployed it. Within seconds, the dulcet tones precision sound-engineered to resemble a composite of literally all their mothers echoed through the house. “ Make yourselves presentable, you heathens, there’s food on the table!”

Then he went back into the kitchen to help Zenyatta transfer dinner from the stove to the table and set out everyone’s favorite drinks.

“I still don’t think our mother would use the word ‘heathens,’” Genji informed him, accepting the glass of lemonade Hanzo handed to him.

“No, but she certainly would have demanded that we make ourselves presentable.” Hanzo replied, pouring his way around the table to his own seat.

“Heathens is the least thing my mother would call this group.” Lucio leaned against the kitchen doorframe, looking for all the world as though it were the only thing holding him up. “But I’m pretty sure she’d mean it as a compliment.”

“What happened to you?” Hanzo asked, appalled, before his better judgment or self-preservation instincts could successfully intervene.

“I’m pretty sure your story’s more interesting than mine when it comes to that.” Lucio grinned, tired but puckish, and came to the table. “Sorry I missed you when you got back home yesterday, Hanzo -- I’ve been pulling double duty on this group project that’s due in a couple weeks. The classmate I was supposed to partner with went home to visit her folks in Amarillo last month and then dropped off the face of the Earth. Didn’t come back, didn’t withdraw, didn’t answer calls or email or anything. The prof only just gave us leave to reallocate her part of the project last week.”

“Oh, man, that sucks. Wait. Wasn’t your partner Cora Hernandez?” Hana materialized in her chair between one moment and the next. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this but...a member of my project team does her work study in the campus security office and her parents have been calling almost non-stop. Texas State PD, too. Apparently she never actually made it back home -- they found her car somewhere south of here, way south, like way into the coyotes-and-batshit-survivalists territory. No offense to your new boyfriend, Hanzo.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” Hanzo replied, reflexively, even as all the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “And he’s also not a batshit survivalist so your apology is doubly unnecessary. Do you know where, exactly, her car was found?”

“I wanna say, like, near Alamogordo? South. ” Hana shook her head. “I feel bad for her family, no matter what.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Why?”

“Morbid curiosity,” Hanzo replied and took his seat, thoughts racing.

Alamogordo was significantly further south, he knew that much, well inside the territory that had been depopulated by evacuation and violence during the Omnic Crisis and never fully rehabilitated for any number of reasons, most of them pragmatically economic in nature. He wished that he dared pull out his tablet at the table and start consulting maps but that would have led to any number of awkward questions that he really did not want to answer at that moment, not with Genji already giving him the iridescently brilliant suspicious side-eye and Zenyatta regarding him with only barely disguised concern. He smiled comfortingly at them both, fooled neither, and attended to dinner and the lighter conversation that followed as best he could, with his mind running in a rapidly expanding series of concentric circles that kept coming back to someone else from my school VANISHED COMPLETELY INTO THE DESERT in the last month and is this the sort of thing I should tell Jesse about or am I actually such a complete asshole that I would use the disappearance of an innocent woman as an excuse to call my crush? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.

It was, according to the household chores schedule, his night to do dishes but, since he helped make dinner, Zenyatta waved him off and instead snared Genji in seductive toils of help-me-and-we-can-make-out-against-the-counter, from which they all fled in various degrees of trauma. Well, okay, he was traumatized, because no amount of walking on Genji engaged in libidinous acts with a succession of attractive partners while they were both still teenagers had successfully immunized him against the horror of seeing his baby brother suck face with anyone, ever. On the other hand, Zenyatta’s heroic sacrifice allowed him the time to book it upstairs, get in his room, lock the door, brace his desk chair under the doorknob, and begin Researching before Genji could unload any degree of Distracting Brotherly Concern in his direction.

Cora Hernandez was, in fact, officially missing -- her family was offering a substantial reward for information on her whereabouts, the state police and highway patrol in New Mexico were actively searching for leads and requesting the assistance of the public. The pictures provided displayed a lovely young woman with a perfectly heart-shaped face, enormous dark eyes, and a sweet smile, who wore her long, straight black hair in a braid or a ponytail. She was an undergraduate student at the University of Art and Design, a fact that jolted him sharply, and the last time anyone saw her was the afternoon of September 11th when she said goodbye to her roommate and set out for home to attend her mother’s birthday celebration that weekend. Her car was found October 3rd in the parking lot of the Lincoln National Forest Visitor Center by a ranger occupying one of the park’s still-manned structures and who reported the discovery to the state police.

So -- almost, in fact, to Alamogordo, one of the modern ghost towns, ghost cities in this case, left behind by the Omnic Crisis, evacuated and never formally reincorporated afterwards as the course of economic redevelopment trended steadily away. People still lived there, of course, individuals and families that trickled back after the war was over despite the formal aprobrium of governments state, local, and Federal, a refusal to restore basic services, and a rather dim view of the returnees’ stubborn refusal just to accept a generous buyout offer for their property and go elsewhere. The returnees were fortunate inasmuch as most of what they’d left behind was still there when they went back for it -- much of Albuquerque had been reduced to rubble and the ruins were a regularly patrolled no-go zone -- and what they couldn’t grow, manufacture, scavenge, or cobble together for themselves, they could trade for with the residents of the Mescalero Apache Reservation just to the north and El Paso to the south. It had been more than thirty years and both the state and Federal governments tended in the direction of ignoring those largely self-sufficient little communities unless a crime was committed that led directly toward them, at which point the authorities would land on the tight-knit family enclaves or scattered individual homesteads with both feet, roust everyone out, and occasionally level everything to the ground. Otherwise, they were permitted to exist largely unmolested thanks very much to a carefully cultivated reputation as batshit survivalists who shot first and asked questions later.

The residents of the unincorporated freehold of Alamogordo had, therefore, made a significant show of assisting in the search for Cora Hernandez once her car was found, as had the Mescalero Apache Tribal Council, though thus far no trace of her had turned up. Her purse, containing her credit cards and student identification, was still in the car, clearly visible on the passenger seat. The car itself had been towed back to Santa Fe and impounded, but a forensic examination had revealed no signs of a struggle or any other sort of foul play, the only prints on the steering wheel, interior, and exterior surfaces being hers. It took six articles on the topic to uncover the fact that the vehicle’s electrical system was dead when it was found, primary and secondary antigrav batteries drained dry, navigation system fried crispy. Much more obvious: that the local residents interviewed had their doubts that she would be found at all, much less alive, with all the requisite “it’s wild territory” and “the weather at this time of year works against us” and, at least to his admittedly biased ear, a certain amount of subliminal “she was probably eaten by a monster from beyond reality, I feel so badly for her mother right now.” Okay, he was probably imagining that but...she had driven a full two hundred miles in a direction, if not precisely opposite her destination, close enough to opposite for the decimal places not to matter. He knew that feeling disturbingly well.

The fact that the car was found by a ranger in all likelihood meant Jesse already knew more about the situation than he, as an uninvolved civilian, could ever possibly uncover and he came to peace with the notion that he was exactly the sort of asshole who’d use this situation as an excuse to call his crush.

Instead of calling, or writing because writing would entail looking at his email which would naturally devolve into responding to email because his goddamned sense of responsibility demanded it, he opened up GeoMaps, his phone’s internal GPS functions, and began the process of tracing his own route as best he could. For a moment, after he interfaced the two and watched the route construct itself according to the GPS’ cache, he thought the data must have been corrupted somehow -- nothing about the contorted cat’s cradle of the return trip made sense. He did not recall making even half the turns his phone insisted he made, switchbacking across barely marked roads in the hills and desert above Route 40 and the Albuquerque Exclusion Zone as though his vehicle were iron filings being dragged back and forth between two magnets before finally coming to a halt just south of Cerrillos, where it finally broke down. On impulse, he manually added a second set of variables: Santa Fe to Alamogordo and asked the program to calculate the most direct route. It was, pragmatically speaking, almost a straight line, one that bypassed Cerrillos to the east, provided that Cora Hernandez had lost her way immediately upon leaving the city -- which was not necessarily the case. The courses as logically plotted did not intersect but he saved the map, anyway, for reference purposes at the very least, and shut down the program.

He was slightly startled to see that it was after ten -- no one had come knocking after dinner chores were done and he had lost track of time completely, he’d forgotten that he was going to show Zenyatta the pictures from his trip, and now he felt like a total ass hat as well as an ass hole. And he had also managed to not pay a single bit of attention to any aspect of his real life that would have an immediate impact on his future, a fact underscored by the number of urgent!red!exclamation!points! in his mailbox once he finally glanced at it. Admittedly, most of them were from one person -- his thesis advisor -- and given Dr. Saddind-Maas had the tendency to send eight emails where two would do and considered everything equally urgent, the odds were pretty good that they were mostly sympathy. Except for the one about making certain he cancelled his studio space reservation if he wasn’t going to use it (he was, he had to, being sent back to his ordinary life for his own protection wouldn’t matter much if he never did anything normal again) and reminding him of their scheduled meeting on Friday. He found his alarm clock in the waste basket -- he had a vague memory of doing it violence and was pleased to discover that it hadn’t been mortally wounded when he pulled it out of the wall. He reset the time and the alarm and, just to be safe, he set a secondary alarm on his phone and set it on his dresser, out of easy reach in the event of another strange night that ended in throwing things.

Hana was asleep on the living room couch with a controller still in hand when he went downstairs which meant, among other things, that she was probably out of energy drink ingredients and he made a note on his tablet to ask her what she needed. He also tucked a throw blanket around her that smelled rather noticeably of patchouli and lavender, put the controller back on the charging dock, turned off the holotank, and made sure the front door was locked and the security system armed. Someone had already refilled the teakettle and so he simply turned on the heat beneath it, dug the little tea-for-one set he’d gotten on a whim and never really used out of the cabinet, and fetched the medicine box, now with a yellow post-it sticky attached.

A whole teaspoon may be slightly too much for your weight. Try one half and if you have another out of body experience tonight, let me know. We may need to consult the herbalist for alternative dosing or blends. - Z.

Hanzo paused, closed his eyes, reminded himself firmly that tomorrow was going to be a completely fucking normal day , measured a half-teaspoon of the tea, set the egg timer for three minutes, and allowed it to steep for exactly that long. One spoonful of honey. Stirred. Drank. Swore at himself because he’d gotten out the tea-for-one thing so he could take it upstairs and drink it there, a fact he had totally forgotten between one minute and the next. Piled all the tea things in the sink to wash in the morning. The somnolent tug of the medicine seemed less intense than it had, which only made sense, and he made it back to his room before his limbs started to feel even the slightest trace of heaviness, and made it into his pyjamas before his head got into the act. Sleep closed its arms around him almost before his head touched the pillow.

The alarm went off at 5:45 am and, this time, Hanzo reached over and thumbed it off, sat up, stretched, turned on his bedside lamp, and screamed.

The silence afterward was fragile and broken by a shout from the floor below. “ Hanzo! ”

Through the ringing in his ears, he heard footsteps -- more than one set of footsteps -- on the stairs, and someone knocking on his door. “Hanzo? Are you okay?”

Lucio, who shared the third floor with him, of course got there first. He wanted to say something, but the words were caught in his throat, and before he could force them out, the door flew open and Genji, Zenyatta, and Lucio all poured inside, Hana bringing up the rear with one of Lucio’s hockey sticks in hand.

“ Aniki, ” Genji crawled onto the bed next to him, back plastered against the wall, and grabbed his shoulder. “Are you -- “

“Oh, holy -- what is that? ” Lucio sounded nearly as appalled as Hanzo felt; Genji turned and looked and his grip tightened nearly to the point of pain.

Hanzo’s room was longer than it was wide, having once been something closer to a storage space than a living one, and he had structed it accordingly. His desk sat just beneath the single window at the far end, with the large standing cabinet he used to store his art supplies and the hanging folders for his assorted portfolios next to it. His bedside table and bed were set hard against the north wall and he usually ended up sleeping with his back against it for reasons he could not quite explain even to himself. Under ordinary circumstances, the inexpensive Swedish prefab chest of drawers that served to store his clothing in lieu of an actual closet sat directly opposite, with a lane between them. At the moment, it was pushed flush with his desk, the supplies closet sat both askew on its base and open, and the open space of previously eggshell white wall between was covered with what happened when sensitive artistic types lost their fucking minds and started finger painting the contents of their damaged psyches all over the real estate. Clearly, obviously fingerpainting because the paint in question was lodged under his nails, dried all over his skin to the elbow, the sheets, the blankets, and his mind was absolutely refusing to focus for longer than a second or two on what he’d drawn, the hideous contorted mass of it stretched across all of the wall and part of the ceiling, and he absolutely could not imagine how he’d managed some of that texture work with undiluted tube watercolors. Or maybe he had diluted them somehow, though he didn’t want to think too deeply on the mechanics of that, either, and Genji was whispering fiercely in his ear in Japanese, Zenyatta was talking quietly with Hana and Lucio, and, from downstairs, the doorbell rang.

“Someone should get that,” Hanzo whispered, and let his head fall back against the wall behind him.

“...I’ll get it.” Hana, unlike the rest of them, was in actual clothes and at least nominally armed; she descended the stairs sounding very much as though she expected to have to use that hockey stick for activities man never intended.

“Hanzo, please.” Genji’s voice was tight with fear. “ What happened? ”

“I don’t know?” Hanzo replied, helplessly. His eyes felt as though they’d been popped out of his skull, rolled in a combination of gravel and tiny slivers of glass, then shoved back in without any particular care for proper orientation; his arms and shoulders and upper back ached as though he’d been exercising unceasingly for hours; he felt, between the ears, more completely and utterly rested than he’d felt in days but the last thing he remembered was falling face-first into his pillow, curling into his mattress. “I...did this, I must have done this but I don’t -- I can’t remember -- I -- “

“I am not certain this is an improvement over involuntary astral projection.” Zenyatta muttered, casting a glance at the wall, a little shudder traveling all the way down his long body; Hanzo found his unease weirdly, perversely comforting.

“ What? ” Lucio and Genji asked, more or less simultaneously.

Hanzo glanced a question at Zenyatta, who shook his head slightly. “It’s...Okay. The trip out to the desert was really, really -- I didn’t want to tell you right away because I knew you’d freak out -- “

“I fucking knew you didn’t just break down.” Genji growled at him. “For fuck’s sake, Hanzo, there is literally nothing you can’t tell me. ”

Hanzo took a deep, calming breath and released it. “The car actually did break down. I was also...attacked...sort of...by something that looked...a little like that. ” He nodded in the direction of the wall. “It yanked my soul out of my body and was probably trying to eat it. The ranger saved me and put my soul back where it should be and sent me home with some kind of protection around me and medicine to help me recover but I traveled out of my body the night before last and now….” He gestured at the wall again. “ Yeah .”

The complex series of expressions that crossed Genji’s face at this recitation was a terrible wonder to behold. “Explain to me, using small words and diagrams, why the fuck you shouldn’t be on a plane back to Japan right now?”

“Because I would rather die than go back and you, my loving brother, know that?” Hanzo replied sweetly.

“That’s actually a pretty good reason, Gen.” Lucio pointed out with what Hanzo considered fairly admirable calm, given the circumstances.

“You’re taking this well,” Hanzo remarked, ignoring his brother’s sputtered objections to both their statements.

“Man, I’ve been playing the music scene in this city for years. ” Lucio shook his head. “You hear some stuff. Get far enough beyond the city limits and you see some stuff. Weird-ass stuff. Also, Zen and Gen and I have kinda had some mutual hallucinatory experiences together and -- “

“Annnnnnnnnnd all right we will solve this problem right here and leave the family out of it . ” Genji gesticulated in an extremely undignified manner and Hanzo found himself swallowing a slightly hysterical laugh and swallowing slightly more when his brother turned back to him, eyes unnaturally bright. “ You almost died. ”

Hanzo closed his eyes. “I’m -- “

“If you say ‘I’m fine,’ you’re going to force me to point at that wall. As a matter of fact, let’s -- “

Hanzo’s phone rang, the sound distinctly muffled by its position face-down underneath the clothes chest. All four of them went for it simultaneously; Zenyatta won, by virtue of having the longest arms, and handed it to him.

The call was from Hana. “...Hello?”

“Uhm.” Hana sounded either deeply traumatized or deeply amused and possibly both. “Your rental car’s back.” Her voice dropped. “I maaaaaaaaaaay have mentioned that something weird’s going on and the, uh, mechanic down here asked to talk to you. I’m turning on video chat -- “

Hanzo pulled the phone away from his ear, Genji and Lucio both gathering close as he did so, the images on the screen a jumble as she handed the phone to someone else. In the wan light of morning, Hanzo received the impression of an almost comically long face, a maniacally cheerful grin, and hair that gave the impression of being just slightly on fire. “Good mornin’, Mr. Shimada. You are -- “ the image blurred again and the newcomer came up with a piece of lined paper, much crumpled. “Hanzo Shimada, right?”

“I am.” Hanzo replied, feeling the world tilting ever so slightly sideways.

“Oh, good. Good. I got the keys to your car down here -- everything oughta be in order, right down to the new car smell, rental agency won’t be able to tell the difference, on my honor.” He practically twinkled with good cheer so infectious it pulled an involuntary smile onto Hanzo’s face. “Now, the chippie -- “

“ Hey!” Hana snapped, somewhere off camera.

“Sorry, chippie, but I didn’t catch your name.” He sounded legitimately contrite. “ Anyway , yer friend told me something’s pear-shaped upstairs. Can I take a look at it?”

“You -- you’re -- “ Hanzo took a deep, calming breath, forced his thoughts to settle, and asked, “You’re a...craftworker?”

“Of a kind. C’mon, lemme see. If nothing else I can tell you if -- “

Before Hanzo could think better of it, he flipped the camera view around and aimed it at the wall.

“--YEAH, OKAY, THAT’S -- YES, THANK YOU. WARN A MAN NEXT TIME, WOULDJA?”

He flipped the camera around again. “My apologies.”

The newcomer was blinking as though he were trying to banish a particularly unpleasant afterimage. “S’all right but --trust me when I tell ya that’s not summat you wanna mess with on your own, okay? In fact, you should probably all get outta there and, uh, maybe burn it down?”

“It’s a rental.” Hanzo replied, reflexively, and felt his world tilt a few more degrees.

“Then call Jess and let him burn it down, I’m pretty sure he could get it smoothed over all official and governmental and such. Oh. And I’m s’posed to tell you that you’re not to worry about a bill or anything, because it’s covered.” That long face rearranged itself into an actually worried look. “But, seriously, call Jess as soon as you can and get outta there in the meantime. For your own safety, mate, trust me.”

“I will do that. Thank you, Mister…?”

“Fawkes. Jamie Fawkes. The chippie -- OW -- your friend down here has my card. For all your mechanical needs.” He ended the call before Hanzo could say anything else.

“Jess?” Genji asked, evenly.

“The ranger.” Hanzo replied, wishing he had it in him to push the world back into alignment by sheer force of will. “His name is Jesse. Jesse McCree.”

“Craftworker?” Lucio asked, perplexed.

“That explanation is far longer.” Zenyatta interjected. “And considerably more complicated. In any case...I suggest we take Mr. Fawkes’ advice and -- “

“Burn down the house?” Hana asked from the door, hockey stick still slung over her shoulder. “I really need to know how you met that guy. Those guys. There were two. A big guy and an even bigger guy. Explanations for a lot of things are totally in order here, is what I’m saying.”

“-- I was about to suggest that we all get dressed and go for breakfast.” Zenyatta continued peacefully. “And contact the ranger.”

Hanzo allowed his head to thud back against the wall again. “And to think I expected today to be normal. ”

#gsor66 #repost #oh look it's spooky season #written before the cowboy's name change

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