John and Marlena (Finally) Get a Q!

Chapter 117 - No One Can Hear You Scream In Salem

*NO!*

The tiny hand slips from hers as it is snatched away into the darkness.

- No, please! Give me my baby back! *Please*!

Her voice echoes into the yawning void. She is alone, freezing, bereft. Reaching forward, she feels around her clumsily. But there is nothing. Each step in the dark is a step of nothingness. A measure of futility.

- Someone help me!!

A sound comes out of the darkness. A strident, discordant cackle. The laugh of the valkyries. It reeks of insanity.

- Who is it?

Her voice is uncertain. It holds no illusions of what the answer will be.

No reply is forthcoming, but suddenly her eyes are assaulted by dazzling light. She holds her hands in front of her face, trying to ward off the intensity of the vicious brightness.

- Where is my baby?

- You will never see them again....

The whisper sends chills coursing through her, and she shivers with dread. She forces her eyes open and looks desperately around her.

She is in a huge white room. The walls seem to go forever. The walls, that are not walls. Pushing on one, she finds herself being sucked into a corridor and she struggles to pull herself free of the web. She is terrified.

- JOHN! Where are you?

The laugh comes again, but this time it is echoed by a deeper, familiar laugh. A laugh that curdles her blood in her veins. A laugh that makes her want to empty her stomach until there is nothing left.

The terror is rising as she realizes it is dark again. Feeling her way along one moist, clammy wall, her heart thumps desperately in her chest. She has to find him. The baby. John. *Anyone*.

An anguished grunt sounds in the darkness, and she freezes. Freezes as the cool wall is interrupted by... a warm stickiness. Freezes as she realizes the sound comes from her own body. Her heart jumps into her throat as her hands feel the sodden lump. The oozing tackiness already drying on her fingers.

And suddenly the light is back, blinding, disorienting.

She stumbles backwards and a moan dies in her throat as she looks up. The shape, the drenched mass is Eugene.

Was Eugene.

He is pinned to the wall in a garish mockery of a crucifixion, unseeing eyes staring straight at her. Blood drips from his toes, the legacy of deep, fatal slashes. It pools on the startlingly white floor. Fire and ice.

She stumbles back against the opposite wall, losing what is left of her last meal as she stares, horrified. She is shaking and her body feels like it is filled with frozen water. The blood on her hands smears artlessly against the snowiness. She doesn't know how to move on.

- Marlena.

The voice beckons her and for a moment she fools herself.

- John? Oh John!

She stumbles away from the carnage that was her sweet Gene and runs desperately, faltering only when the tears blur her vision so much that she cannot see.

Rounding the corner, she stops short, her face contorting with terror and sheer horror.

- *NOOOOOOOOOO!!!*