Rumple-fuckin-stiltskin

Participants:

buddy_icon.gif sibyl_icon.gif

Scene Title Rumple-fuckin-stiltskin
Synopsis Buddy ain't.
Date February 26, 2018

Ruins of Staten Island


The putter and chuff of a diesel engine doesn't carry as far as it seems like it ought to in the predawn light — tires pushing shattered concrete and broken glass like gravel. Headlamps sweep blinding white up the flank of a burned out tenement, searing retinas before the engine cuts and takes the light with it.

The crunch of tires is replaced by the crunch of boots, and there's a quiet clomp to mark the driver's side door swinging shut. A single excited bark is silenced with a hiss, sshhht.

Minutes later, it's the dog that wriggleworms onto the scene first — grey on grey squeezing busily between slabs of concrete on her way to an open courtyard she knows well. A man in a skullcap follows close behind, heaving a conspicuously human-sized and shaped heap behind him. He has a flashlight gripped in his teeth, spotting out boulder-sized chunks of the building beside them. The one he stops at is already mottled in castoff patterns of brown and black.

Flashlight clicked off and tucked away, he turns and stoops to drag the zipper open on the bag he's been dragging. There's a person inside, bound, sobs stifled behind a gag. He dumps 'em out with a twist and a hook of his boot that looks rehearsed.

"Mornin', Jeffrey."

Takes him a second stoop and reach to slide something else out of that big black bag — a long metal rod that he swings up to examine the business end of. It has prongs.

Small pieces of rubble tinkle down from several stories above and bounce when they hit the ground like hail flecks. Staten Island is large enough that there are plenty of wide open, overgrown spaces where the chances of crossing paths with another person are slim enough to border on nonexistent — as much as Sylvester might try to convince him otherwise, Buddy wasn't wrong to include this particular corner of criminal's paradise among them.

Of course, every rule has its exception. Princess becomes aware of the third presence first; freshly scrubbed hair and skin carry a scent like soap on the breeze, mixed with wool and the damp leather of someone's mud-caked boots. The dog also smells stale cigarette smoke and dense, woody fragrance that's bitter and floral at the same time like tea left to steep twenty minutes too long, or tart coffee.

A glance up at the source of the tumbling debris only reveals a cloudy sky freckled with rapidly-fading stars. Maybe a passing shadow.

Thumb and shirt tail pinched to clear a slick of fresh blood off the rod's fork, Buddy pauses at the zither of rubble down through the ruin stretching up overhead. He tuuurns, slowly, to where they rattled to their end, his thumb crooks to make one last pass over the prod's end. Processing.

A friendly "RWHOFF," peaks a little shrill in Princess the pitbull's excitement. Turns out, dogs can look up.

She's shimmying, wagging her rat tail and stumpy butt, excavator paws raking cement as she rears to paw a support column's flank.

Now, at last, Buddy looks up too. He looks up for a long time, breath funneled slow through his nose, eyes given time to distinguish black from black and blue from blue.

"Hell. You see anything, Jeffrey?"

Jeffrey writhes against his binds on the ground beside his boots, flinching against a blind nudge of the prod to his shoulder. Poke, poke. And louder:

"Gosh, I sure hope not. Hate to have to set the damn thing on fire to be sure."

"Please don't do that." The request comes from above, as Buddy might already suspect. Sibyl doesn't show herself because that would require a flashlight she doesn't have. There's an ambient glow hanging at tree-level where the rising sun has started to transform the sky from black to darkest violet, but it's enough to create shadows that weren't there a few minutes ago, allowing Buddy to pinpoint her silhouette.

She sits in a crouch at the edge of the building's wide, flat roof like an ornamental cherub, or a judgmental cat. He picks out the rabbit fur collar of her coat, drawn up for extra warmth, and the bent shape of her legs as she rocks her weight forward onto the balls of her feet.

The voice that answers back is smaller than Buddy expected. His shoulders drop out of their emerging bristle, prod gone slack under the turn of his wrist, and there's a stretch of silence while he takes time to chew that over.

"Well since you asked so po-litely," he says.

Princess woofs and whines and shuffles, claws scratching, keratin on concrete. Long strings of drool glimmer in what little light there is bouncing down blue off the dome of the sky."You mind finding another shitheap to squat on? I got some personal business to attend to."

Sibyl lifts a hand off the edge of the roof, shrinking back as she eyes Princess with the same sort of cagey aversion displayed by most felines when confronted with an excitable dog. She looks ready to spring away and claw her way down the same way she presumably climbed up.

There's an old access ladder on the other side of the building, rickety and rusted with several rungs missing where the elements have corroded them away. Also: multiple staircases inside, in varying states of collapse. She has several routes of escape available to her and is probably stalling for time while she narrows her options.

"I think I have to," she says. That's honest, at least.

"You don't gotta do anything you don't want to."

Buddy depresses the button on his stick, and there's a poisonous crackle and snap from below. A stab of light arcs white between the prongs; he looks down to guide the next arc neatly into Jeffrey's ear, in spite of a good amount of twisting away.

Jeffrey screams, muffled through filfthy cloth. Even Princess tucks tail and bolts, springing doe-like off a platform and deeper into the ruin.

"It's a free country."

Sibyl rises, stretching the muscles in her legs and back with the stiffness of someone who's been holding one position for too long. It's possible she's been watching him since she heard the sputter of the truck's engine or saw the headlights swoop around the corner. Either way, she paces along the gutter — or the length of wall where there used to be a gutter — small enough that she doesn't have to worry about the roof collapsing, but not so lightweight that the steel won't creak or groan. More stone flakes away.

There's sympathy in the look she steers at Jeffrey on the floor of the courtyard. Apology, too, hidden away behind the fear and growing contempt. There's not much she can do from up here.

Or from down there.

She re-centers her attention on the man with the cattle prod. "Are you Buddy or are you Eugene?"

His brow turns up to follow her along once she's back to moving, free hand brought up to scruff the cap off his head. He's balding beneath it, shiny as the dog's spit in a crown of sweat-prickled grizzle, boots braced wide apart against the bump of poor Jeffrey's writhing.

"Buddy Arrowood," says Buddy, "pleased to make your acquaintance." Princess returns at a scamper, cresting a ridge of slag and garbage with an optimistic wag of her tail, and Buddy adds: "This is Princess."

The tilt of his potato head is more intent the further Sibyl makes her way along, closing in from passive distraction into something more attuned now that she's asking questions. He's not just looking at her anymore — he's squinting at the side of the building, strangely a little birdlike in his rudimentary calculation. Jeffrey sure isn't going anywhere fast.

"Do you always do your brother's work for him in the morning?" Another question. "That's kind of you." She sounds like she might be teasing him, except that sincerity softens the edges of her words. A smile sucks any venom out, whether it's intended or not.

She stops at the corner of the roof to assess the distance between Buddy and his truck, making her own calculations around the maximum speed at which a dog can run, and the length of her own legs versus the length of Buddy's legs.

Does she even know how to drive?

"I like sleeping in," she confides, "especially when it gets so cold. Bet there are other places you'd rather be, too."

"Excuse me?"

Scruffy head still stuck at a tilt, Buddy drops the end of his prod down again, skepticism bit deep into the furrow of his brow. The twang in his indignation cuts all the way down into the butt of his spine and the cock of his hip.

"Are you bustin' my fuckin' chops?" About the human resources take on torturing a dude in a post-apocalyptic ruin? He lights up the prod again, and leans to sink it into the back of Jeffrey's neck. This time he doesn't take his thumb off the trigger, eyes on Sibyl, and Jeffrey's too busy convulsing to scream about it.

"How old are you?"

From where she's at, she can see the white of the truck and the way to get there. What she can't see is whether or not Arrowood here left the keys in the ignition.

"Sixteen."

If she's chop bustin', Sibyl doesn't press the issue. She takes to a crouch again and seeks out a twisted piece of exposed rebar poking out from below the ledge. Using it as an anchor for her descent, the girl drops, scrabbles, swings down onto an adjacent windowsill.

There's an empty space where the glass pane should be, and as the sun continues to rise, its light causes old shards to twinkle on the ground below beneath a thin layer of grime. Someone blew it out a long time ago.

Her hands brace against either side of the frame. When she glances back over her shoulder at Buddy, her smile is gone, replaced by a flat, rumpled expression that continues to deepen around the corners of her mouth with every second the cattle prod pops and sparks. "Stop it."

Her voice lacks the authority for it to be an order, which she's in no position to be making anyway. Just a sharp request with a slightly keening hitch to it.

"You think 'cause you know who I am I'm gonna listen to you? This ain't Rumple-fuckin-stiltskin. There aren't any fuckin' po-lice." DUMMY, is the implication, easily read between the lines of Buddy's inflection.

He twists his wrist, muscle cabled up the back of his arm under his jacket wrenching the prong of the prod into the softer skin under Jeff's throat. The faint scent of burning flesh mixes with a garble of bloody froth.

Princess is gone, turned tail again at the first static pop.

"What's the magic word?"

Please.

Sibyl is suddenly begging him with her eyes. Empathy isn't an ability reserved for people with special powers, even if Buddy seems distinctly lacking in this department. The involuntarily, ghoulish sounds bubbling behind Jeffrey's gag cause her pulse to quicken, and she becomes aware of a crushing sensation that bears down on her chest, making it difficult to breathe without putting additional thought or effort into it.

That's panic.

She and Princess have something in common in the next instant as she vanishes through the gap in the window. Boots scuff and more shards of broken glass crackle under soles inside. Buddy hears the galumph of her retreating footsteps.

"I told you it was personal."

The voice of Buddy Arrowood lashes harsh after her retreat, echoing through hollow walls and empty windows.

The rest of him stays put, trigger let off with an impatient switch, prod dropped down in the rubble like a garden wand. Clunk.

"Sorry, Jeff."

He drops to a knee — switches a knife open out of his pocket to cut off the gag just in time to avoid a bubble of bloody vomit. Pat pat, he pats Jeffrey's cheek with the flat of the blade, once he's shuffled his squat to avoid getting any yuck on his boots.

"You know how kids are."

As Sibyl hears the sound of her own boots scuffing, she's liable to hear the scatter and scrape of paws wheeling around the rubble outside. Initially in pursuit, very soon detoured into the frightened squealing of a caught rabbit.

She has time to scoop up her bag on the way out but abandons everything else she’d hidden away in the room upstairs: an extra set of winter clothes, including a white coat for camouflage during period of heavy snow and a tatty mohair sweater, three tins of salted mackerel only slightly past their best before date, raspberry preserves, and an opaque jar of ground coffee that smells a little like dirt.

Her crudely-drawn maps of Liberty Island and the surrounding area are forgotten, too, but also probably of less interest if Buddy goes poking his nose upstairs.

While the dog is occupied, Sibyl squeezes out through a gash in the back wall. Tall, dead grass drooping in the morning frost covers her tracks and makes it difficult to discern which direction she's taken off in as she bounds for the treeline.

The rabbit's loss is her gain.


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