by windsor blue
Disclaimers - Gundam Wing and its characters are owned by Sunrise, Bandai, et. al. This is a work of fan fiction and is not intended to make any profit nor hold any monetary value. This story was inspired by far too many years of exposure to police and detective dramas, documentaries about serial killers, and true crime books. I don't own any of those, either. Any story elements from said works have been filtered through my head for so long that I no longer have the faintest notion from whence they came, so if I stole a plot point from your script for Law and Order or something, I apologize, and would beg you to take it in the complimentary manner in which it is intended.
Summary – Duo flies to his friends’ aid, but where is he going and what will await him there?
Warnings - This chapter - PG-13 for angst and situations. Overall - NC-17 for violence and situations. Again, see Chapter 1 for the full story.
Soundtrack – All good action stories need a soundtrack, ne? These are songs that were in my head while I was writing, and may or may not appear in the fic.
This chapter –
Hotel California by The Eagles
Cities in Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees
California Uber Alles by The Dead Kennedys
Trying to sleep had proven useless. Duo jerked the pilot’s chair up from the reclined position and rubbed his eyes with his palms, sighing. Closing his eyes had brought no rest – no respite from the vision lodged in his head; the vision of two of the best friends he’d ever had bound, gagged, bloodied and unconscious on the floor of an animal cage.
God! How did this happen?
He rose from the chair and paced around the cramped cabin like a tiger on the prowl, glancing irritably at the ship’s chronometer. Thirteen hours and twenty-nine minutes ‘till landing, putting him at the coordinates an hour and a half before his thirty-six hour deadline was up.
You’d better pray I don’t catch you lurking around, pal, ‘cause there’ll be hell to pay if I do…Scratch that… when I do.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he shouldn’t have left a message for Heero.
Nah, he’ll understand. He’ll be pissed off as all hell, but he’ll understand.
He slumped back into the pilot’s chair heavily, the voice in his head turning ugly. Besides, you’re the one who said it, aren’t you? No commitments, no regrets, right Maxwell?
Yeah, he’d said it, all right, and he was still kicking himself for it. Hell, he’d said it to both of them.
No commitments, no regrets.
He’d repeated it like a mantra for the whole six months the three of them had lived together, wrapping himself in the phrase every time the emotions in his heart had threatened to overtake him, to drown him in their intensity. Every time he’d found solace in those eyes, either the blue ones or the black, he’d repeated the phrase to himself, if for no other reason than to give himself the courage to keep going, full speed ahead.
No commitments, no regrets.
So why had it hurt so much when Wufei had taken off?
“I just need a few weeks to sort things out,” he’d said.
“Yeah, sure.” Duo had replied, masking his panic with indifference. “No commitments, no regrets, right Wu?”
Duo could still feel Wufei’s grip on his hands, his breath against his ear as he’d whispered his farewell.
“What if I told you, Maxwell, that my only regret was that there were no commitments?”
And then, with a soft kiss, he had left. Duo had simply stood there and watched him go, open-mouthed and frozen, ankle-deep in the viscous puddle of his own melting soul.
Two weeks later, Heero was gone, too, and all Duo had left was the cackling voice in the back of his head throwing his words into his face at every opportunity. No commitments, no regrets.
“I’ll be back, Duo. I promise I’ll be back.”
They’d both said that, sealing their vows with kisses on his mouth.
That was four months ago. They had been apart almost as long as they had been together.
Duo shook his head and glared at the hapless chronometer again, snarling at what it told him. Thirteen hours, twenty-six minutes. “Well, fuck,” he grumbled. He turned his attention to the short stack of pages he’d printed out of the shuttle’s computer – all the information he could find on his destination.
The coordinates he’d been given were on a coastal area of the North American continent that had been dubbed “The Dead Zone”. Once a sprawling metropolis with countless suburbs, it had earned that name after an earthquake in the year 2004. It was a relatively small quake, and initial news reports had claimed there had been only minor structural damage and no loss of life.
What no one could have noticed was that the trembler had caused cracks in several waste containment units buried underground at a nuclear power plant that sat precariously close to the ocean. [1] The cracks allowed a witches’ brew of deadly toxins to seep from the spent fuel rods into the air and water. Within 96 hours, nearly all the area’s residents were dead or dying of radiation poisoning. An entire county was completely decimated, with large chunks of those to the south, east and north being evacuated. [2]
No one had lived in the Dead Zone since. Cleanup crews sent to the area in later years came back with horrific stories about what they saw there – many of the victims had no idea they were sick until it was far too late. More often than not, the corpses were found in offices, cars and shops – wherever the locals went in the course of their daily lives – as if Death had taken them completely by surprise.
More often than not, it had.
Another sigh escaped Duo’s lips. Shinigami’s already been there once.
After studying the maps, he realized that he knew the place by another name. A couple of years after the war, he ‘d gone through a phase where he’d been insanely curious about the land of his ancestors. He’d pored over every book on American history or culture he could get his hands on, trying to create the heritage that was never bequeathed to him – as if some small part of him thought that he could find his long-lost family by becoming more American.
Of course, it hadn’t worked out that way. He still wasn’t sure who his family was or where they had come from, although he had a couple of ideas. But his research had left him with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of American history and a fondness for the 20th and 21st centuries, dubbed the Postmodern Era by some historians.
Yes, he’d heard of the Dead Zone before, and he’d heard of the disaster that created it. But until he looked at the maps he hadn’t connected it to the other, decidedly less melancholy name he knew this place by.
Whether it was by design or by accident, Duo would never know, but the man who had taken his friends had given him the coordinates to Surf City, U.S.A.
He almost laughed when he made the connection, remembering how much Wufei had hated those silly surf movies he had rented one weekend in a flurry of 20th century nostalgia. [3] Genuine domestic bliss, man, and you fucked it all up. How could you not notice that the only thing they really wanted was the one thing you wouldn’t give them? He pushed the papers away from him with a low growl. And now what? You think you can just ride in to the rescue, and that will make everything okay?
“Yeah,” he said to the empty cabin. “Yeah, that is what I think. What’s wrong with that?”
For a few blissful moments, his inner voice was silent.
Thirteen hours, six minutes. Duo wrenched the pilot’s chair back into the reclining position, but this time he didn’t close his eyes. Instead he stared at the ceiling of his borrowed shuttle, focusing his mind on remembering every scrap of those six precious months, trying to quiet the demons clawing away at him. He started where he’d left off – how he’d taught Heero and Wufei about licking salt off the side of your hand and sucking on a lime wedge before taking a drink of your beer, what that salt had ended up getting licked off of instead, and how he never had actually seen the end of “Muscle Beach”.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Consciousness tugged at Wufei like a needy toddler. He groaned low in his throat, wishing consciousness would just leave him the hell alone.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Still restrained, some part of him realized absently. He tested the mobility of his wrists and found there was none. Something bit into his flesh there – plastic? – and something else clung to him over and around it with an unpleasant stickiness. Zip tag and duct tape, the soldier in him recognized. [4] Effective.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
He tried to swallow and found an unnatural dryness in his mouth. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. Gagged. Blindfolded. He tried to stretch his legs only to have them hit something metallically solid. Cage. Thought of everything. Hair clung to his face, tangled in his blindfold. Where's my hair tie?
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
What the hell is making that damned tapping noise?
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. One, two, three, four, five. 05.
With a start, he recognized the code they had devised during the war. Five taps. 05. He answered with four taps of his own, leaning back a bit so his feet could strike the edge of his cage.
R U OK?
Y, OK. R U?
Y, OK. R-I-N-G G-O-N-E.
Ring gone? Wufei jerked forward and back, pointedly feeling nothing where his pendant should have bobbed with the movement.
M-E 2.
He heard Quatre’s breaths go ragged and pained. 04, R U OK?
The answering taps came more slowly than he would have liked. Y, OK. W-H-R R W-E?
D-N NO.
A-L-L D-E-D.
Wufei froze. All dead? His next set of taps came frantically. W-H-O?
W-H-R W-E R. A-L-L D-E-D. N-O P-P-L.
No people? All dead? Wufei knew better than to doubt his friend’s unique gifts, [5] but if that were the case, then escaping would be more difficult than he thought. So much for disappearing into a crowd somewhere. It dawned on him suddenly what Quatre must be going through, sensitive as he was to the spiritual realm. Where we are. All dead. No people. And what else, Quatre? How many spirits are trying to speak to you right now?
04, W-L B OK. W-L G-E-T O-U-T.
I N-O 05. W-L B OK. T-H-N-X.
A sudden jerk startled them both into stillness, and the dull roar of an engine could be heard around them.
W-E R M-O-V-I-N-G.
Yes, we are, but where to?
W-L B OK, 04. A-L-L OK.
General - My science throughout this thing is probably pretty sketchy, but I'm trying to make it as feasible as possible. If I totally blow it, please let me know. As Scotty says, ye canna break the laws of physics!
[1] San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, if you're interested.
[2] This is actually frighteningly possible. Not probable, mind you, but possible. San Onofre sits on an active earthquake fault, and they have been burying waste - including spent fuel rods - on-site for about five years. Granted, I don't really know if radiation poisoning can decimate thousands of people in a matter of hours, but I wouldn't really like to find out the hard way, either.
[3] A little slice of the alluded to genuine domestic bliss is on display in a separate post called Fish Tacos, if you're interested.
[4] The thin plastic strips that have a little locking mechanism on the end...I don't know if law enforcement calls them zip tags or not, but that's what we used to call them when I worked in retail. (shudder)
[5] I'm taking a few liberties with Quatre's sixth sense. I intend to abuse it mercilessly...perhaps a bit OOC...just fair warning.
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