Starlight

XXXIX: Wait For Me

Welcome to the penultimate chapter.

I'm aware that it's very long, but it felt disingenuous to rush, or to break this one up into smaller, more bite-size pieces. A lot happens in it: considering that the next chapter will be the last, it felt right to just let it be as long as it needed to be.

I hope you enjoy it.

xx.xx

Who are you to lead her?

Who are you to lead them?
Who are you to think that you can hold your head up higher than your fellow man?

- 'Wait For Me', Hadestown

xx.xx

One bullet in the head, another in the heart and a makeshift pyre of firewood and gasoline. How could they come back from that?

Robbie had thrown the match; Henry stood with his arm around her shoulders.

It had gone up as quickly as a lamp being turned on, as bright, too. The heat was immense and the smell caught in her throat, black and acrid and cloying.

When there was nothing left to burn, and the angry flames had ceded their claim, Henry donned his mask and gloves once more and dragged what was left of the couple into their shallow graves.

Robbie wasn't a religious woman. Still, she whispered pleas for Charlotte and Sam's peace as he piled the earth of top of them.

She hadn't watched; she had no desire to see what twisted and charred remains the flames had left behind. Besides, Ted had quietly wept as the fire raged. Robbie had sat with him in the lounge, a silent offer of the olive branch. There was clearly history there, and it was not her place to pry.

"The heat burns the sickness right out of them", Henry had said, as she approached with a plastic bag for him to dispose of his PPE. "I took a look under a microscope and those little blue cells have stopped regenerating."

"So, that's the solution? We torch all the infected?"

"It'd be a start. They're sure to infect others at a much faster rate than we can kill them - especially if they make it out of town. I know that the bridge is up, but it's only a matter of time before they work out a way to Clivesdale."

"Earlier, you said that the hive mind is centralized around the meteor, right? Like, that's the source of their thinking; it controls them?"

"The spores must have come from somewhere, yeah. It's not unreasonable to assume that it acts as a kind of nervous system."

"What if I went in there and destroyed it, right now? Just went to town with a grenade?"

Henry shivered, heading back toward his front door. "Have you ever seen a hand grenade go off? It's not like the movies; there's no great, all-consuming ball of fire. It'd blow it apart, sure, and do a fair amount of damage to the Starlight. It might even stun those creatures for a short while. But all the spores in that rock would have to go somewhere, and my guess would be that they'd be headed straight for the nearest, non-infected pair of lungs they can find. They'd recover."

"So what do we do? Burn down the whole building?"

"That might just do it. Firstly, we need to get out of town before they do and contact the right authorities. Now, we mustn't tell Finn, nor anyone else we care about: I don't trust that President Goodman, and this is bound to be a government cover-up the likes the world has never seen before. We couldn't guarantee his safety. I'll speak to other scientists, I'll make anonymous tip-offs to the military, and then..." Henry opened the door for her, and she strode inside his house, not knowing that it would be the last time she ever entered through that secure front door. He gave Ted a sympathetic glance. "We tell them they need to burn the whole town, for good measure."