Chapter 27:
The yells came from the direction of the fence line, and Clark was moving before anyone else had finished processing the sound. Lilly was half a step behind him, her rifle already unslung, and they burst through the front door together into the afternoon light.
Lee was on the ground near the fence post, using a tractor left out on the street as cover, one hand pressed against his left arm, his face caught in a wince. Mark was flat against the tractor's rear wheel, unhurt but pinned, his head down.
"Mark!" Lilly's voice cracked across the yard as she brought the rifle up, finding the figures in the tree line and firing before Clark had fully registered where she'd aimed.
The arrows stopped after the first two shots.
Clark was already running by that point, relying on Thick Skin and Superhuman to do the job against the arrows if they did start to shoot again.
He crossed the yard in seconds, Superhuman showing its supernaturalness, dropping to a crouch beside Lee first and getting a hand under his arm.
"It's nothing." Lee's sleeve was dark at the upper arm, the stain small but spreading. "Grazed. Didn't go deep."
"Let me see." Larger Than Life shot down any further argument from Lee.
Lee moved his hand. The arrow had caught the outside of his arm, a shallow cut maybe three inches long that was bleeding more than it should. But there were no more injuries. Lee looked at Mark. "You good?"
"Yeah." Mark's voice was tight with tension, afraid that the next arrow would be right on his shoulder. "I'm good. Unhurt."
Clark nodded, looking to Lilly as she joined them, the older couple's hug being ignored as Clark frowned at the electrical fence, the ambush with arrows, and the shots that Lilly fired. He has been ignoring Half Light for too long now.
They moved Lee between them, Mark taking the side with the injured arm and keeping the pressure there while Clark took his other side, Carley taking the front and leading them to the path back to the gate and then inside the house that Branda had opened for them. Lilly was covering the tree line, her rifle moving in short arcs, tracking the spaces between the trunks where the figures had been from behind them all.
Half Light buzzed and whispered when he looked at Branda and then Dannry, who joined them, immediately getting assaulted with words by Lilly and Lee for turning the electrical fence on while Lee and Mark were outside. His excuse was that he heard them say to turn it on.
"He's lying." Clark closed his eyes, finally embracing dejection and resignation. His shoulders dropped. Clementine, next to Brenda, frowned in confusion, with others joining them. The sole exception was the old woman and Danny, who stiffened for a moment.
"And what's that supposed to-"
"Shut the fuck up." Lilly immediately turned, rifle loaded and aimed at Danny's head, walking up to Clark's side and keeping an eye on him. "Clementine, get away from her," Lilly ordered, and she did after Clark sighed in grief.
"Lilly, calm down." Carley tried, but she did not calm down. Instead, she put her finger on the trigger, keeping an eye on them and Clark.
"What's going on?" Larry's voice came from the hallway doorway, the voice of a man who had no idea what was going on. He took in the scene right at the house's entrance, Lilly's rifle, Danny's stillness, Brenda's face, and his jaw set. He didn't know what was happening, but his daughter had a gun up and her finger on the trigger, and that was enough for him to step forward and put himself roughly in line with her. Not blocking her shot. Just present.
"Lilly." His voice was lower than usual. "What is this?"
"I don't know yet," she said, without looking at him. "But I'm going to find out."
Branda hadn't moved from her spot, not even an inch. But her face, her expression had changed into fear and worry, her eyes darting to her younger son, Danny, who didn't look at her at all; instead, he remained fixed on them. Waiting for something.
Immediately, Clark realized, Andrew. The man's older brother and Branda's older son weren't with them. He was with Kenny, Katjaa, and Duck, checking up on the calf and the supposedly sick cow.
He tried his best to listen with Half Light out to the barn, but nothing. The generators were acting as white noise, interfering with his wanting to pick apart the sound around them.
"You're upset," Brenda said. Her voice was warm. Genuinely warm, mixed with worried and stressed, Clark thought. "You've had a hard day. Your friends were hurt." She looked at Lee, at the bandaged arm, with something in her eyes that read as concern for themselves or Lee; Clark couldn't pick that up. "Let me get you all something to eat. We can talk about whatever's worrying you once everyone's settled."
"That's not going to work," Clark said.
Brenda looked at him.
He met it. He kept his face neutral, because whatever was coming next was going to require him to be clear-headed, and he was going to be clear-headed, and the grief that had been building since he walked through the farmhouse door and smelled his childhood was going to have to wait- no. No more grief. No more getting lost in memories and in the past. His eyes went to Clementine for a moment, and then, immediately catching sight of Carley's hand on her stomach, it clicked for him, giving him another reason to look to the future.
He looked to the farm one final time before watching the duo in front of him.
It was time for the old him, the soft him, to die.
And what better place than the last place where he had fond memories with his parents. It was a nice place to bury himself.
"Please-"
Branda tried to say something before stopping. Her concern and worry were replaced with surprise, and then joy and happiness as her eyes caught something behind them. Larry also seemed to see it first before them as he was facing the same direction as Branda, with Danny's stone and stoic face- creepy if Carley had to add- turned into an even creepier grin.
"Andy!"
They turned, with the motel group as a whole going stiff.
Andy had Duck in front of him, one arm across the boy's chest, the other holding a pistol that he pressed against the side of a terrified Duck's head with the casual steadiness of a man who had made this decision before coming from the barn and was past the part where he had feelings about it.
Duck's eyes were very wide. He wasn't making a sound. Whatever had happened in the barn before Andy brought him to them, Duck had learned something about the world that nine-year-olds shouldn't know, and it showed in his face.
"Easy." Andy's voice was the voice of a man who was used to this. He wasn't anxious. Not angry- maybe a little due to them pointing a gun at his mother and younger brother. But his tone, his voice, was practiced. "Everyone just needs to calm down."
"Andy-" Brenda's voice, and for the first time, the warmth had a crack in it.
"It's fine, Ma." He didn't look at her. He was looking at Lilly's rifle. "We just need everyone to settle. That's all this is."
"What did you do with his parents?" Clark asked, feeling… weirdly calm about all of this. The previous rage that he felt in the motel from the ambush attack, the frustration and anger at seeing Lee hurt, and the worry and concern that he should be feeling for Duck and the others. He had none of them, as Clark simply turned his back to Danny and Branda, staring at Andy.
He even gave a smile to Duck, an attempt to calm the boy down just a little, which worked, as Larger than Life seemed to pull its weight. Duck was still terrified, but his shaking calmed down just a little.
In his head, Clark changed up his abilities, leaving Stone Skin and SuperHuman be, but the other two, he replaced them with Project Image and Double Jump.
"They're fine," Andy said. "I just need your lady friend to lower her rifle. Then we all talk like adults, and nobody gets hurt." He glanced at Danny, a small gesture, a chin-lift toward Lilly. "Danny-"
Danny started to move toward Lilly and then froze as his eyes caught movement beyond the fences.
A two-story shape of compressed horror, muscle, and dead matter fused into something that had no right to be the height it was, multiple heads erupting from the torso and shoulders at wrong angles, eyes blinking out of sync with each other.
Color drained from Danny, Branda, and Larry's faces first as their eyes widened in terror.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!" Larry shouted, pointing at the two-story monster, taking a couple of steps back, and stumbling back. His hand shot to his chest in fear.
Branda's expression was much more terrified, as her knees gave up, while a hand went towards Danny. But he was out of her range, as her hand gripped nothing but air. She collapsed on herself, the gravel and dirt under her turning wet.
Danny had turned to stone. His mouth was open. His eyes were fixed on the thing at the fence line, and his brain had stopped sending his body any instructions at all.
Lilly, Carley, Lee, Mark- all of them had turned. Even Clementine, even knowing Clark's abilities- the shape of it was wrong enough that her body reacted before her mind could contextualize it, and she took a sharp step backward and hit Lee's chest as he unconsciously wrapped her and Carley in a hug to protect them.
Andy looked back.
That was all Clark needed.
He moved.
Superhuman carried him across the distance in the time it took Andy to register the sound of footsteps- fast enough to be wrong, fast enough to be the kind of fast that didn't parse correctly- and Clark activated Sharpen, running the edge up both forearms as he closed the gap, his skin taking on the quality of something that could part material at contact.
"ANDY-" Danny's voice, hoarse with panic, already too late, as Clark used Double Jump.
Clark came in from Andy's left side, from below his sightline, below the angle the gun was pointing. His left hand found Andy's gun wrist. He didn't grab it. It sliced through it.
Cleanly.
Without any reaction, his face remained stone cold.
The gun hit the ground. Andy's arm followed a fraction of a second later, the severed wrist hitting the dirt. Andy stood upright, his body still operational on adrenaline and shock, his face turning slowly toward what had just happened to him; his brain was still processing what had happened to him.
Clark's right hand came up right as Andy- no, Andrew's face twisted in pain.
He hadn't been thinking about this. The killing blow. And it only happened in the last moment, for Duck's sake, for the nine-year-old who was right there and had already learned too much today. He'd considered the Leaf Blade, but the Leaf Blade would mean blood in an arc. He'd considered Superhuman applied directly- it didn't matter.
Clark's other hand was already moving.
A karate chop, if karate chops came from a body that could lift a truck and had sharpened running up to the elbow. He brought it down across the side of Andrew's throat with the full force of what he was and had become in the past several months, and he felt no impact, as his hand cleanly went through his neck.
Andrew St-Johns' body went down without a sound. One vertical drop, like a structure whose load-bearing element had been removed. His head fell right in front of Duck, eyes wide open in terror and twisted in pain, mouth wide open in a silent scream, as it rolled.
Duck looked at Clark's face first. The streak of blood there, dark and vivid. Then at the warm wetness on the top of his own head, which he touched with one hand, he looked at his fingers. The rolling head settled right in his view, face up, showing Andrew's last expression to Duck, as the nine-year-old boy froze, eyes meeting Andrew's dead ones.
Clark didn't stay to comfort him or tell him what to do. He had better things that needed to be settled. He thought he heard Brenda's scream of pain and grief or Danny's yell of rage and loss. But in the end, it didn't matter. Because he had a future that he needed to focus on. The cries of flies and insects from the corpse of his memories didn't matter anymore.
The next second, he almost disappeared from next to Duck, Double Jump putting him halfway towards his next targets. One of them had kicked Lilly in the guts and taken her rifle. It aimed at him and fired-
Stone Skin, Superhuman, and Thick Skin stopped the bullet at his skin, leaving another giant black and blue bruise that did nothing to him after tasting the pain that was his skin, bones, and organs being melted and remade.
The man let out a terrified scream- Clark immediately put a stop to it, his hand thrusting forward at Clark's target. When Clark pulled his hand back, there was a hole in Danny's throat, the man falling to his knees and then to his side, twitching and moving weirdly.
The last one, Branda, simply looked at her younger son, watching as he drowned on his own blood, trying to hold back a hole the size of a fist for just one moment. One second, before Danny stopped.
"Terminus. Who are they? What is your deal with them?" Clark asked, finally ending Project Image. A second later, the two-story ghoul also faded to nothing.
Branda didn't answer, as her eyes remained on her dead sons' bodies, tears running down her face as she even seemed to stop breathing. With a cold, calculated thought, Clark crouched right in front of her, cutting her view of her sons.
"Terminus. What was your deal with them?" He asked, making sure that all she could see was his face, and only his face. Even if that meant he could feel her breathing on him, Clark didn't care.
If a farm like this were taking actions to put them in danger for whatever reasons, that meant Terminus knew about it and didn't care. Instead, they wanted in on that.
"Clark." Lee tried to stop the interrogation, but Clark didn't even glance back. Instead, he showed one bloody finger, as if asking for a minute, which he was.
"What did you give Terminus in exchange for safety?" He asked the broken mother, soothing his voice just a little, hoping for it to work- "Meat." Branda's dead voice answered, her eyes staring at his green ones, as if she were lost in a dark jungle, waiting to be devoured. A smile graced her face.
"Human meat." She continued, Carley, Clementine, and Mark finally wiping their mouths from vomiting, and then they're face turned from horror from Clark's action to disgust at Branda's admission. "We bring small groups to our farm, with the help of Terminus, and take their meat."
Clark's face didn't change, as Branda's smile seemed to get even more deranged. "It's okay." She spoke, as if nothing had happened, her dead eyes returning to warm and bright, even if it looked lost. "You should harvest my sons before they spoil." She continued, a giggle escaping her. Lilly went to her father, deciding to ignore what she heard, while Clementine vomited once more at her words.
"We'll be good for another-" Clark's hand sliced through her neck, killing her before she could continue- another splash of warm blood dirtying his already tight and small shirt-
"Duck!" Kenny's strangled voice broke the silence, as the limp man and his wife ran to a frozen Duck who was still staring at Andrew's face in a twisted pain that was slowly returning to just… open mouth, the dead muscles relaxing.
Kenny reached Duck in four strides and dropped to his knees in the dirt in front of his son, his hands going to Duck's face, his shoulders, his arms, running over him the way a man checked something precious for damage when he wasn't sure what kind of damage to look for.
"Duck. Duck, hey. Look at me. Look at me, buddy."
Duck didn't look at him.
His eyes were still on Andrew's face. The expression there- the frozen, open-mouthed thing that dead muscles settled into- stopped.
"Duck." Kenny's voice had dropped to something Clark had not heard from him before, but had heard from his own dad. Raw in the specific way of a man who would do anything to take something back and had just understood he couldn't. "Hey. It's okay. It's Dad. It's okay."
Duck didn't respond.
Katjaa reached them a half second behind Kenny, her expression still painful as Clark noticed her holding her stomach in pain, going to her knees on Duck's other side, her hands finding his, her face doing something complicated and painful as she took in the state of him- the blood in his hair from Andrew's arterial spray, the locked stillness, the eyes that weren't focusing on anything that was actually there.
"Duck, baby." Her voice was the gentlest thing in the farmyard, and it made him remember his own mom, but her voice landed on nothing. "Duck, look at mama."
Nothing.
She looked up at Kenny over their son's head. The look that passed between them had no words in it. It didn't need words. It was the look of two parents who had made a decision months ago that they would protect their child from this world, and were now sitting in the proof that the world had not agreed to the terms.
Clark watched from where he was standing.
He was aware of the blood on his hands, his forearms, and the front of his shirt. He was aware of the silence that had settled over the farmyard since Brenda's voice had stopped. He was aware of the faces around him.
Lee's, which was the face of a man processing several things simultaneously and hadn't arrived at an expression yet or had and wasn't sure how to voice it.
Carley's, which was pale and had been since the human meat admission, and she hadn't recovered.
Lilly's, which was at her father's side, one hand on his arm, her rifle back in her hands and her eyes moving over the yard in the automatic sweep of someone who had decided that vigilance was preferable to feeling anything yet.
Mark, who was looking at the ground with the face of a man who had no idea what he was supposed to do or feel.
Clementine had her back to Andrew's body, but not Branda's or Danny's. She was looking at Clark with extreme worry, as if she saw something slowly getting lost and never getting it back.
He met her eyes for a moment. She didn't look away. But he did.
He looked at Duck.
The boy still hadn't moved.
"He needs to not be here," Katjaa said, low and precise, to no one and everyone. "We need to get him away from-" She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to.
"Inside," Lee said, already moving. "We'll use the house."
"No," Kenny spoke up, voice firm, as if he had decided on something that only he had opinions about. "No, not the house."
He, without another word, gathered Duck against his chest. The boy came with him without resistance, which was its own kind of wrong. Duck, who had an opinion about everything, who had never in his life shut up about anything, went limp and quiet against his father's shoulder.
Kenny stood. His jaw was set in the way it got when he was managing something that wanted to come apart, and his eyes didn't go to Andrew's body or Brenda's, and they didn't go to Clark. He carried his son to the RV, and Katjaa followed him, and the door closed behind all three of them.
The farmyard was quiet.
"Okay," Lee said, to no one in particular, to the air. "Okay." He ran a hand over his face. "We need to-"
"Supplies," Clark said. "Just take clothes and medicine, anything useful. Leave anything that's food-related behind." He looked at Lilly. "Can you and Mark check the barn perimeter? Stay out of the building, but I want to know what's out there."
"On it," Lilly said, and Mark moved with her without being asked.
"Carley." She looked at him. "Take Clementine and Lee, check the farmhouse kitchen. Spices and things we need only. Don't go further in than that."
"Clark-"
There was a groan, then another, and another, as the three heads in front of him moved-
"I'll deal with the bodies-"
Before anyone could speak another word, the RV's engine turned on, as dread pooled in everyone's gut- except for Clark.
"Don't tell me-" Lee muttered,
"What is he…?" Carley's voice died.
"No…" Lilly let out, as the RV reversed, Kenny glaring at them all from the driver's seat. Lee ran after him, waving his arms, yelling at him to stop, his injury forgotten. But it seemed like Kenny didn't care, as the man turned the vehicle around and then drove off as soon as he got to the road.
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AN: So... Is Kenny justified? Do you hate him? Love him? What do you think?
It's a little bit of a short chapter, less than 4k words (That's 3 chapters for you webnovel readers. 3 in 1. I need those powerstones. I need to get into the loaderboards.)
Regarding Clark, he has FINALLY snapped and has decided to say, FUCK IT! Enough mopping around, enough living in the past. It's time to look forward, as his dad told him.
I'm kinda nervous writing everyone's else reaction to Kenny jsut dipping with his family. In my head, I can picture them, as if it was a movie, and their reaction. But I'm not a good enough writer to write those down. So, I'll struggle with it for the following days.
A little spoiler, the action hasn't ended. Clark has learned about Terminus and that they are cannibals. That makes it 2 groups that he now has to eliminate. Cause he's Clark. And Clark has a rage boner agaisnt bandits. Though this time, it'll be him going to their door and knocking personally.
A huge spoiler regarding this story and my life. I plan to end this story in the following 6-7 (hehe) chapters, with each chapter being about 6k-7k(Yes, you got comboed) words if they have require it to be that long.
After this story, I'm going to upload 2 stories in this thread as sneak peak.
Both first chapter of The Boys (the series, not the comic) and MHA.
Based on your votes and the one who won, I will write that story(Just gotta learn how to make votes in QQ now).
Let me know what you all think.
PS: I want to write MHA. But I know I will get tired of writing MHA after, idk, 20 chapters since it's so overwritten. Another aspect of it will be that I might get flamed a lot for "not getting things right" since MHA has somewhat of a "toxic" fandom. Specially in Webnovel. Idk about QQ.
The Boys would be fresh and it'd give me an excuse to really watch the show instead of through tiktok.
So far, what I have for an oc idea is: Twin of Homelander. But he kinda has opposite power. Like Bizarro is to Superman? At least, that's my rough idea. I really want to see you guys' ideas and if yours is better than mine, I will take it. (Yes, I will steal your idea for my story. In some parts of that world, that's "our" idea, but my story. hehe)