Participants:
| Scene Title | Six Rounds |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | It's all a joke until it's suddenly not. |
| Date | July 14, 2021 |
Dim evening sunlight through tall mill building windows. Pigeons coo and flutter in their roosts in the exposed rafters, and floor-to-ceiling supports cast long and deep shadows against rich orange hues across the bare concrete floor. There is a houndstooth-upholstered armchair in the middle of the warehouse floor, duct-tape holding the fabric on to the chair's frame. A plywood plank on two milk crates serves as an end table, where an oil-burning lamp sheds a tiny amount of warm light. On the floor, an old gray Sony PS-LX2 turntable sits, connected by a labyrinth of extension cords that trail all the way across the otherwise vacant living space. A single, large speaker is propped on its side, connected by taped-up wiring to the turntable.
Another long shadow crosses the room. Booted feet tread across cold concrete, black cargo pants with full pockets. Joshua Lang stands in the middle of the vacant apartment, looking around, listening for sounds. He goes over to one of the windows, looks up to the pane that's open to let birds come and go. He squints, trying to imagine a world in which that seems like a good idea. He can't. Circling back to the kitchen he finds mail from a few weeks ago, sifts through it looking for anything important; noteworthy. Lang frowns. Hospital bills, already open. He rifles through them, then sets the paperwork aside and does one last pass through the apartment.
One bedroom. Small closet, eclectic clothing choices. He reaches up, feeling around in the small shelf above the clothes rack and finds a shoebox, pulls it out. There's old photographs in here, tucked away, forgotten. A brownstone in Manhattan, a happy couple standing beside a car. A newborn eating cake, a boy with his first bike, a teen on his first day of high school. Then it all stops. There's a wedding band and a few empty bullet casings in the bottom of the box; six rounds. Lang pulls them out, rolls them around in his palm. Nine millimeter. He puts them back, puts the lid back on the box, and returns it to where he found it. He leaves the apartment, knows exactly where he needs to go next.
Later
Raytech Industries NYCSZ Corporate Campus
Jackson Heights
July 14th
7:04 pm
She's off work at seven in the evening, walking with a slight limp. Lang watches her from a parking space on the street. Loses sight of her behind the high concrete walls closing in the campus. Security's tight, guards are heavily armed, there's construction work happening. Shit went down here, bullets pock-mark the wall. The asphalt is still torn up from explosives. He waits until her olive green '77 Chevette leaves the compound to start the engine on his truck. He gives two cars time to move in behind her before he pulls off the curb, following her on what he expects to be a route to her house. It isn't.
Lang follows her car south. She gets on the freeway and zips down from Jackson Heights to Red Hook, then through the traffic of the bustling downtown until she stops at a multi-story red brick building on the neighborhood's outskirts. There's a large sign on the lawn out front of the building, not for a tenement complex but a rehab center. Benchmark. Lang slouches in his seat, drives a little past Benchmark, then circles around and parks up the street facing her car, turns off his engine, and waits.
The sun goes down, city lights come on, and Lang listens to the sound of distant police sirens and music from neighboring apartment complexes while waiting for her to come out. The clock on the dashboard of his truck reads a few minutes past nine. The air is warm and sweet tonight, blowing through the open windows of the cab, carrying with it the scene of a restaurant a block away. It reminds him of how hungry he is. It's right about then that he hears the click of a hammer and sees a silhouette in his periphery. Gun pointed at him through the window, small revolver. Held in two hands.
"Easy." Lang says, slowly placing his hands on the steering wheel. "Let's go'n think this through."
There's a moment of silence, then, confusion in an exasperated, "Joshua?"
Lang finally turns, seeing the woman he'd been following had doubled back on him and gotten the drop. Confusion turns to an awkward smile. "Surprise?"
Sera disengages the hammer on her revolver and tucks her gun back in her purse, jerking the passenger side door open without so much as an invitation. "Joshua?" She repeats, her voice a shrill whisper. Lang raises his hands in feigned surrender, only to be slapped about the shoulders and head repeatedly, then lunged at in a ferociously tight hug. He laughs, awkwardly, tenses under the attention and gingerly pats Sera's arms around him.
"Been a long while," Lang says with uncertainty in his voice as she disengages from the hug. She's crying, wiping her eyes, overwhelmed with a flood of complicated emotions. She was already raw, coming from therapy, and this wasn't what she expected to find at the end of her gun. "Sorry for not turnin' up when you needed it. You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"I thought you were dead!" Sera shouts, hitting him again. "I read that—I read that book and they talked about you and they said you were dead!"
Wolves of Valhalla. Lang winces, stomach sinking. Another life, another him, though apples that fell in the same spot from different trees. He likes to think things have changed, but knows how they haven't.
"That's what I was hopin' people would think." Is Lang's believable lie. Sera hits him again. "I don't even remember the last time we saw each other," sounds like a figure of speech, but it's the truth. Because he isn't sure where this Sera and his Sera diverge.
"It's been years." Sera says shakily, and Lang things that the roads didn't diverge in that different of a wood.
"The funeral?"
Sera nods, wiping her eyes again. It unsettles Lang how similar this all is, and yet different at once. He isn't even a shadow of the man who left New York after the bomb. Thinking back on that time twists his guts in ways he can't even put words to. When Sera asks, "Where have you been?" he hates the possibilities for those answers.
"Making mistakes, hurting people." Lang answers, jaw flexing between thoughts. "Comin' around. Trying t'make amends. Getting old." He can't look her in the eye, it's such a gross generalization. But then, he remembers where she was when he left her. "You still hangin' around with Walsh?"
Sera recoils at the mention of that name, her eyes grow saucer-wide and she can't look him in the eyes anymore. Instead, she folds her hands in her lap and stares down at her knees, shoulders hunched forward, jaw trembling. The tears find their way back again.
"Hey if you ain't eager to go down memory lane I'm not gonna press." Lang says with a shake of his head, but then Sera turns those big eyes up at him, ones full of regret and self-loathing.
"They're here." Sera says in a whisper. "They came to my work. They—they killed my coworkers. They shot me." She says, one hand gently gripping her thigh. Lang looks down at the gesture, jaw flexing again, and watches. Listens. He lets her talk through it. "I don't think they know who I am. Was. I don't think—Nobody does. Hell half the time I'm not even sure I recognize myself in the mirror." She's still raw, still an open wound from earlier. Lang starts to reach out to put a hand on her shoulder, but thinks better of it and stops halfway.
"You still ridin' that line?" He has to know.
"No." Sera whispers sharply, covering her face with her hands. "No I—god, the war. The fucking war." Her voice is hoarse, raw with emotion. "Are you?" Again, she read the book. The Joshua Lang in black and white print was one bathed in blood.
"No." Lang answers back, a shamed whisper. "Ain't thought like that in a long while. Got disabused of the notion. Started over." He looks at Sera. "Like you did." Then he looks away. "People deserve a second chance." That's what Eileen had told him so long ago.
Sera doesn't disagree, and they feel disgusting in silence together for a while. Eventually Sera stops disassociating and sniffles, wiping at her eyes and nose with her sleeve and shakily opens the passenger side door without saying a word. Lang grabs her wrist, just firm enough to make her reconsider but not enough to stop her if she was determined to leave. He finds out she's not.
"You know where they're at?" Lang asks, gently unwinding his fingers from her wrist. Sera glances back at him then shakes her head, stepping out into the jaundiced glow of the street lamp.
"Why?" She asks back at him, hand on the door.
"'Cause you're family. 'Cause they tried t'burn down my home. 'Cause maybe I feel shitty and doing something right might make that go away." Lang answers, and the two share a long, silent moment. Disbelief still hangs in her eyes, that he's alive after all this time. But just once she wants a win, wants something good to happen, so she clings on to it. Even if it might be a lie, it's a convincing one.
Sera shuts the truck door, then leans in through the open window. "They had machines." She warns him. "Military stuff." He nods, expecting as much from the news reports he'd caught. Silence now, again. Neither says goodbye to the other, they just understand that the moment has passed. Joshua turns over the engine and takes one last look at Sera, and she at her brother-in-law, before he pulls away from the curb and drives off into the night. Tears well up in her eyes again, and she is left whispering to herself.
"What the fuck."
Some Time Later
Providence
New Jersey Pine Barrens
Darkness is thrown into flickering torchlight as a bulkhead door to a grimy basement is drawn open. Lang pulls the wooden door aside, then raises his lantern and steps down into the crumbling brick basement. There's a few inches of standing water, rats, no sign that anyone has been down here since Iago fled Providence before the fire came. Looks like Providence's Only Law had a threshold of loyalty. The back of the cellar has a few crumbling wooden boxes stacked up in it, filled with half-rotten bags of lye and sodden sacks of concrete. He hauls them aside, revealing several large waterproof bags. Iago fled light, didn't bring these with him. That's what Lang was counting on.
Picking one of the bags up, he sets it atop an old workbench and unseals the water-tight opening. From within, Lang withdraws a dusty black helmet. With a single breath he blows it clean, then uses his palm to smudge away some of the rest of the grime on it. Two fingers reach behind the jaw of the helmet, finding a small, circular button that, when depresses, causes the helmet to whine softly.
Six orange eyes illuminate on the faceplate.
