Rhianna stayed on his couch. Despite the "boy funk", she'd kept herself fastidiously clean. She began her day by running to a cousin's place to shower. Today she wore the same clothes from the previous day. She jumped at the sound of a distant thump.
"Percy, what's going on?" The rasp in her voice thickened with the onset of a cold.
"If you want, I'll go check." Percy loved the longtime smoker's timber of her voice, though the bruises about her neck told him that smoking was not the cause. Part of him secretly hoped she might get sick, not too sick, but just enough to slow her down and depend on someone else. Just enough so she'd let him watch over her properly. He just wanted a chance to prove himself.
"Don't leave me," she said, then quickly corrected. "Us."
"We can't just wait here. If nothing else, things might have changed. It's OK. I'll be right back." He smiled a brave smile as he opened the door. He held his breath and rushed out.
The hall was empty, but smelled of burnt crack, vomit, urine, and BO. His heart thudded, his pulse throbbed at his temple. Blood rushed to his ears, a roar of oceans that muddled his thoughts. The linoleum, bubbled with age and cracked underfoot. Thinking he heard something, he tilted his head to the side. Someone tried to skulk toward him. A figure came into view, with the quiet scrape of a hesitant shuffle.
"Momma?"
Miss Jane held a fiend lean, defying gravity as if caught up in her high. After a few moments, her head at impossible angles, she snapped out of her revelry and staggered toward him. Clumps of matted hair nested at one side, the rest mere wisps which hadn't been pulled free. The corners of her eyes leaked a yellowish fluid, like formaldehyde tears. Dried vomit stained her clothes. Her shirt flapped open, revealing rot across her chest and leaving one sore-riddled breast exposed, ready for him to suckle.
"There's my baby boy. All grown up. Almost a man," she said, her foul breath nearly making him gag. An ancient rasp, her voice wasn't her own, almost like another one laying on top of hers, as if her own back-up vocals. The Miss Jane thing shambled toward him with the gait of someone who had every bone within them broken, yet remained propped up.
"Momma, you all right?"
"If I'm not, what are you gonna do? You so simple. I should've smothered you when I first saw those big doe eyes of yours. I knew then that you didn't have the sense God gave you. No heart whatsoever. Not your daddy's son."
"Don't say that, Momma." Percy clumped as if wounded, a big man deflated which made him appear that much smaller. He wanted to reach out and hug her, to feel the heat of her against him and have her protect him against the world. That was the mother he remembered. The mother before the drugs, before the bad things, before men, life, and need used her up and left this withered thing behind.
"Sh, baby, it's true. Look at you. Ready to cry. Chasing after the Pendragon. That's your destiny, you know. But not the life I'd have chosen for you. I've never been the best mother, but least I could do is put you out of your misery."
She lunged at him, arms outstretched in an eager embrace. Flesh worn soft, her clammy skin pulled from her bone like perfectly cooked ribs. Her putrid breath worsened as her jaws snapped open, her teeth anxious to rend into his neck. He pushed at her as they grappled, not letting her get her balance or purchase. Her spindly frame no match to his girth, he charged her. He kept running until they crashed into the wall next to the stairs.
"Give Momma a kiss." Miss Jane's lips pulled back over cruel teeth.
Percy pivoted and then flung her down the stairs into the maw of shadows. All he heard was the sickening crack of splintering bones.
"I'm sorry, Momma," he said into the darkness. Through the window the remaining fiends shambled toward the building. Events tumbled toward an endgame. Turning to return to his room, a cloud swirled at the end of the hallway. Not smoke. The mist seeped from walls and had a knowing quality to it as it slipped to the ground in an intelligent trawl. It worried him more than his errant mother. He rushed back to the room and stuffed clothes at the crack of the door.
"What is it?" Rhianna asked.
"Precaution." Percy slumped onto the couch.
A smoke alarm dangled from the wall, the light from the previous floor fading with each step along the stairs. The next floor's light had long burned out. Wires hung from the ceiling. In the residual light, they could make out a final graffiti pronouncement along the stairwelclass="underline" "A city of refuge in a time of great tribulation." Though none dared voice it, all were bone weary. Merle hadn't spoken in so long even Wayne missed his spouted gibberish. Wayne trundled on, vowing to exercise more when this ended. The keloid on the back of his neck ached. King walked point, unfazed by the intermittent light and the peculiar dance of shadows. Each ascending stair step, despite the sense of climbing one's own gallows, was a minor victory as their feet became heavier and heavier. Their ragged puffs reverberated louder than they wished in the stairwell echo chamber. King was the first to turn the corner leading to the final floor and thus was the first to spy Green.
An impassive sentry, he stood there with a burnt brown suit over a burnt orange shirt with a matching orange and brown tie and pocket kerchief. A chinchilla coat rested on his shoulders. No expression crossed his face. No recognition, no resignation, only a flat affect of business. King came to an abrupt halt with Merle and Wayne bumping into him.
"Fallen so far?" Merle began. "An exercise to experience what we experience."
"We now, is it? You consider yourselves one of the mortals, do you?" Green said, his voice the sound of rotted bark giving way. "This, at least, was my choice."
"You were always about choices. How is dear old Morgana?"
Green said nothing.
"What's the matter? Winter got your tongue?" Merle pressed. "I heard a story once. Of a man transformed to exist only as the adversary to the court of chosen knights. Some people knew him as Bercilak de Hautdesert, some as the Green Knight. Part man, part vegetation elemental, he challenged any man to strike him with his ax if he would be allowed to return the blow a year and a day later. One knight took the challenge. But when the appointed time came, the Green Knight barely nicked the chosen one, as said knight had passed all of the tests, made the right choices, set before him. What say you?"
Wayne's keloid on the back of his neck flared with the blazing intensity of a sunburn. He rubbed it but found no solace. The hot pain ran to his core and unsettled him with its sudden familiarity.
"There were many knights. As the age changes, so do its players," Green said.
"So we begin anew. The eternal cycle."
"I got this," Wayne said.
"No." King grabbed him by the arm. "It's my responsibility."
Merle put his hand on King's arm. "No, the first assault belongs to the good Sir."
Without another word, Wayne strode into a sprint, taking the stair steps two at a time. Green remained rooted to his spot. Wrapping his arms around him, Wayne ran through the room and slammed him against the wall. A window shattered behind some cheap venetian blinds. Wayne held him aloft with both arms, attempting to squeeze the life out of Green's trunk-like neck. With a baleful glare of calculating malevolence, Green clapped Wayne's ears, breaking his grip and sending the two of them tumbling to the ground. When they got up, the span of two bodies separated them.
"My turn," Green said simply. His first blow knocked Wayne from his feet. His neck jerked forward and suddenly his mouth filled with the taste of his own blood. The keloid on Wayne's neck burned. Green cried out as vegetal shoots sprouted from his mouth. Leaves blossomed from his nostrils and ears. With a huge sweep of his arm, his fingers became branches, bare limbs of hate scourging King and Merle. Weeds erupted through the floorboards, the mildew spoors given new life: first trapping their feet then, kudzu-winding up their bodies, the roots squeezed them. Turning his attention to Wayne, a jutting spear of a branch impaled him in the shoulder.