Rose Petals - Eyeless Jack x Reader

Chapter 23

[23— Out in the Open]

   Everything was packed by the time the night had buried the sun under the horizon, and the house was difficult to navigate in the dark as you carefully went down the stairs with Liam.

   Your heart was heavy, anxiety having seeped into you and coagulated in your chest. It had been slowly building inside of you since the burial, and even more so as it got darker out.

   You needed to destroy that thing, and desperately so. Yet, you knew how fast it could all go wrong, even before any of it ever began. You've never faced the thing before, nor did you know everything it was capable of. It was unearthly, some parts of it beyond your comprehension, and that meant that anything could happen, and that, you would never be prepared for.

   Liam had hardly said a word since the burial himself, and you didn't like it, or the way he refused to open up when you asked him about it. It made you wonder if you should have ever said anything at all.

   Trying to shake off the thoughts, you and Liam went straight from the last step to the front door, where Jeff and Jack were waiting. Like you and Liam, they were carrying their own bags full of stuff.

   "Fucking finally," Jeff muttered as he turned to the door and opened it, "aged ten years just waiting for your lazy asses."

   In response to that, Jack gave him a hearty shove out of the door. Jeff stumbled on the porch before catching himself on the railing, and whipped his head around to snap out a nasty remark, before seemingly biting back the comment. He shoved himself off the railing and stomped off the porch, shaking his head in frustration.

   You ignored him, walking beside Jack as the four of you crept into the night, finally leaving that rotting building behind. Bright lights flooded from the surrounding buildings and streetlights, serving as guidelines for the route to the forest in the dark, and the only thing you had to listen to were four pairs of footsteps, as not even the bugs were playing their nightly tune.

   Looking at Jack, you thought back to what he had said earlier about not having any more kidneys in supply. This meant, that, somewhere in the process of winding through the labyrinth of a city toward the nearby forest, you would all have to stop and find something for him to eat. He would have been no good battling the faceless being if he had to fight the starving thing inside of him as well.

   Your gaze then moved past your boyfriend, landing on Jeff. Earlier that evening, you had suspected that, maybe, he was planning on betraying the three of you. You were only able to qualm the concern when you remembered that the faceless thing wanted him dead, for whatever reason that was, and realised that he would have nothing to gain from screwing everything up.

   The next while was spent sticking to the shadows and avoiding the line of sight of people walking the streets and cars driving by. After what felt like a few hours, Liam was beginning to complain about his feet hurting, and you could only quiet him by telling him that it wasn't much longer until you would all stop. This turned out to be true, as the buildings were slowly beginning to sparse out into more rural territory.

   The four of you trekked down a dirt road for a little longer before veering off into grass, which stood up to your knees, and made your way toward a farmhouse sitting in an open field. Moonlight shone off the tall grass as the four of you waded through it, the blades shimmering in waves as the wind blew against them. Around the house was a vast expanse of fences, to which held what you could only decipher to be cows. Beyond the farmhouse and the fences and the field, way off in the distance, was the looming silhouette of the forest.