Chapter Text
Tap-tap-tap-tap.
The door opened inward at the knocking, and an oblong-shaped, soft-featured face with ringlets of brown hair leaned out, in time to see a cardboard takeout tray of four colourful coffee and milkshake cups held out towards her alongside a brown bag of takeout food.
“Hey. I got us some bites to eat on the road.” The owner of the hands holding that food and drink out to Madison Russell was a handsome, dark-haired guy at the end of his teens with a sort of rugged build that came solely from his skull structure rather than any experienced hardship, standing on the front porch in front of the palm tree and insect-populated shrubbery that grew thick on the Russell house’s front lawn. “I mean, I’m sure you know what city food looks like, right?” The guy in question, Alex, asked with a charming white-toothed smile at Madison, who snorted out a laugh which covered the slight butterflies she felt stirring in her stomach.
“I know what city food looks like,” Madison reassured him, taking the front-most milkshake which had her name scrawled on it from the cardboard tray.
“Great,” Alex said all-casual in that deep but smooth voice of his. “So, anyway, that place I told you about?” Smiling, he gestured with his head (he probably would’ve used his arm if both hands weren’t currently occupied) to the green wagon’s front that was visible past the Russell property’s vegetation, pulled up on the curb in front of the currently-empty driveway. “If we take off now, we can be there just after dark. You wanna see it?”
Madison smiled.
The busted wagon shot down the winding, narrow country wood through the wood, the trees casting black shapes against the twilight-purple sky in which a crescent moon hung, the rear lights trailing red behind it – it was moving a bit above the speed limit, but not so fast yet that it’d make anyone sober and with sense worry for the occupants’ welfare. Alex at the wheel was grinning and chuckling.
“The team captain actually did that?” Madison exclaimed with a grin in the passenger’s seat, following up on the guy’s anecdote about an incident in the high school hockey team’s locker room; the second of the two drinks with her name on them in her hand.
“Yeah,” Alex, said, grinning as he turned to glance at her. “His girlfriend stormed into the boys’ locker room, he said that in front of her, and she threw a whole cup of toilet water in his face! Like she’d planned how it was gonna go!” Madison wheezed, and she caught Alex flashing a humorous grin at her again – a few hours ago she would’ve been blushing at that grin, but Alex’s demeanour had put her at ease.
“This special place of yours, why’s it out here?” Madison asked, grinning back over at him.
“So no-one can see it and wreck all the precious stuff there,” Alex replied. “And it has a view you won’t believe. I mean, you’ve seen Titans and all that shit up close, right?” A while ago, Madison’s grin would’ve faded a little when he brought that up – she knew a lot of people were still talking about her late mother, the genocidal terrorist who’d gotten millions of people with loved ones killed. “This will blow you away.”
“Oh, yeah?” she challenged him softly. “I’ll bet you ten dollars it doesn’t impress me.”
Before long, Alex’s wagon was pulling up at the side of the road, the beams the main source of illumination. Alex promptly threw open his side-door.
“Come on, this way,” he said. Whilst Madison was getting out the passenger side, Alex was already heading into the woods through which, some miles away, was the Becks Lake Fish Camp and then the Escambia River. Madison tried to keep up as they headed down a steep embankment dotted with trees, the headlamps behind them the only source of illumination as everything else was cast in silhouette. Madison had been to nature spots (on and off the beaten track) on all the wilderness-enshrouded rivers of Pensacola since she and her dad had moved here, but she’d never been this way before. Though Madison’s survival training from her mother (one of the things she didn’t regret about her time with her) kicked in as she easily dodged and worked around branches and sharp shifts in the sloping terrain, whilst Alex navigated through it like he knew it (which he did) down ahead of her. Still, he was going fast and getting ahead, faster than Madison could keep up without being at high risk of tripping.
“Hey, wait up!” Madison called into the night’s blackness.
“Come on!” she heard his voice distantly call through the blackness – he’d gotten much further ahead than she’d anticipated. “I thought you knew how to get dangerous, monster-girl!” Madison was slightly surprised at the slight jibe, but pushed it down for now, thinking it was nothing. Then she heard a noise – it was a few seconds before her usually-sharp instinct cried danger and she halted. The noise sounded like it was coming from all around, but not like there was a single stalker in the wood – more like there was a ring of speakers producing the whispering, scratchy sounds.
“We are the infection. You.-Are the infection. But like all living organisms, the Earth unleashed a fever to fight this infection.”
Madison recognised the voice, she recognised the infamous speech which she’d had a live backstage seat to which had long since entered the public domain, and she recognised the familiar slightly scratchy-booming quality of electronic speaker-amplified sound; coming from all around through the black trees, in a semicircle. Madison was staying rooted in place dumbly, not moving, unlike when she’d faced down Ghidorah in Fenway Park.
“After we lost Andrew, I trained-You-to survive.” She picked out the slight jumps in tone where different audio clips from that infamous speech had been spliced together to rearrange her mother’s words. Then, past her mother’s electronic and edited-together false words, Madison heard sounds that weren’t coming from an electronic source – jeering and cackling. One voice she was sure was Alex’s laugh, the other a more feminine laugh.
“I’m saving the world. –some things you can’t run from-!”
Madison’s breathing grew heaver, felt rougher on her throat, and she was scarcely aware of her gums tingling as her upper- and lower-teeth drew closer together. Emotions swelled in her powerfully, stabbing like a cold lance into her heart – betrayal was one of the more prominent emotions. Tears were stinging her eyes as the distant cackling went on and her mother’s recorded voice repeated that moment she’d said Andrew’s death wouldn’t be in vain whilst she was orchestrating the suffering of millions more families. Madison couldn’t stop the tears falling on her smooth skin, but the tears were hot – and she could feel in her core that those tears’ source was going to get hotter. Now Madison heard more than two voices jeering. That’s when in all directions (like her mother’s voice was coming from all directions), nearly half-a-dozen roving, flickering flashlights came on, wheeled unprofessionally about by the half-dozen giggling teenagers holding them.
“What’s the matter, Maddie-lady?” one silhouette jeered, a teenager about Madison’s age or a little older, and another one of them promptly followed up with:
“We thought you’d want to hear your dead Momma’s voice again.”
Madison said nothing. She just stood, breathing in deeper and harsher breaths than was normal – the tears were indeed getting hotter, as was the core of her torso. She turned and she sprinted – the teenagers didn’t chase after her (she guessed they didn’t have the guts), this time they just jeered even louder at her retreat. Her boot fluidly but barely avoided tripping over a black home surround-sound speaker, one of several networked around the dark wood, from which her mother’s voice was repeating that half-delusional speech from the Mass Awakening.
The teenagers’ jeering continued getting louder, hoping the sound would follow Madison as she fled back through the dark wood as far as possible – a few of them even decided to give chase through the woods after the girl, howling loudly in taunts. Alex was one of the kids who was standing by hollering like a coyote with a hand to his mouth, Janine the blonde cheerleading school captain cackling with him with her head on his shoulder as they watched the freak daughter of Emma Russell run like a scared little girl.
After a few moments, once the few teenagers who’d chased after Madison started coming back with the beams of their flashlights wobbling with their arms’ lazy movements, the jeering began dying a little and a boy murmured amid the post-laughter euphoria, “You think she can find her way back?”
“Pfft, what if she can’t?” Janine scoffed derisively, curled her lipstick-red lip at the high-school boy who’d dared be soft over her. “It’ll be one less Nazi freak in the world like her bitch mother.”
About a week had passed since Janine, Alex and their posse of high-ranking football team members and popular girls had pulled their prank on Madison, and they were back at their hangout in the woods – that Alex had a hangout there was something he hadn’t lied about, and now that little freak-bitch who’d stained their neighbourhood just by living in the area knew to stay the fuck away from their territory. And as far as Janine was concerned, now the freak would have absolutely no illusions about getting her grubby paws on goods that were too high-quality for her, like Janine’s hunk of a boyfriend. The sky was near-black, and a half moon hung high in the sky above the high-schoolers’ small clearing in the woods, chanting filling the air from their little encampment in the concrete foundations of an old storm drain, along with a Little Mix song blaring from an iPod speaker.
“Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go!”
The well-built and blonde guy finally sputtered on his pitcher glass and caved – his friends with him tried to keep him drinking forcibly, but he was strong and he pushed them all back, spewing what drink hadn’t gone down his gullet in front of the LED camp-lights the group used to light their hangout in place of a campfire (the ringleaders of the lot said campfires were too backwater for the cool ilk, despite some of the lower members of the gang feeling otherwise). Janine, at the opposite end of the LED light-collection, didn’t care for those boys’ crappy game, in fact she inwardly swore that if they got even a drop of booze and their filthy drool on her shoes from the drinker’s spray, their social status at school would go down dramatically. She was busy texting on her phone whilst Alex sat with his strong arm around her shoulders, keeping up with all the social media news. She’d thought about leaving a mean comment on the profile of this little slut from school a while ago, to join the many comments she’d already left on that profile saying how pathetic it was that she didn’t post on her profile more regularly; but Janine decided against it. Said slut hadn’t turned up to school in days, and Janine passingly wondered if maybe she’d done the world a favour and cut her wrists. Soon she came across a post by a different user which curled her lip.
“Ugh, I don’t believe this!” she exclaimed for Alex and the two other girls near her to hear.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“It’s Alice!” Janine exclaimed, lip curled as if the girl in question had just taken a shit on a desk, pointing to the picture of the auburn-haired girl and the lanky, curly-bearded guy she was with in her social media account’s newest photo. “What the fuck is she doing dating that plant-groping loser?!” Janine immediately got to work typing a response on her phone.
So you like sucking dirty dick now huh maybe you should take your tongue to Colin in the toilet stalls, with a raspberry emoji added on the end. She hit send, though with the limited reception out here it would be a few painstaking minutes before the comment hit the web.
“Your social life is officially over, bitch,” Janine quietly promised at her cellphone’s screen.
A squeal of static from the iPod almost made half of the camp consisting of nearly a dozen jump in surprise, so sharp and piercing and sudden it was.
“What the fuck’s wrong with that thing, Anna?” Alex snapped irritably at Janine’s side, almost taking the words out of Janine’s mouth. Practically no-one heard, through the static, the slight whisper of a voice murmuring something indecipherable.
“I swear, my daddy just bought it like, a week ago, it must be the manufacturers!” the girl in question insisted as she went over towards the device to fix it. She was a few paces from the iPod when the burst of hissing gave way and the song resumed. Confused, Anna glanced back at the rest of the gang and one of them shrugged their shoulders in confusion. Anna began walking back to her former position among the group.
Then a new squeal of static came through the device, ten times more loud and piercing as it distracted all ten teenagers from whatever they were doing, forcing them to cover their ears with their hands. If any of them had listened closely, they might’ve heard a deep, guttural roar just subtly underlying the screech of white noise.
“For fuck’s sake!” Alex snapped, getting up from beside Janine and marching around towards the thing to turn it off or fix it.
“We’re gonna get you… We’re gonna get you,” the words were whispered through the white noise, making Alex halt as he heard it, and after that, the white noise died down like a calming storm for a moment but didn’t disappear entirely. He clearly heard the voice, but couldn’t quite place the voice’s gender. Did anyone else hear it?
Janine sighed in frustration, unfazed, “It’s probably interference or something! Shut it off.” Alex reached forward, but froze when…
“Not another peep… Time to go to sleep.” The voice came through again, unmistakably clear this time – it sounded like a man and woman’s voices were speaking in complete unison. “Shouldn’t be nast-eeeee… Now you’re gonna screeeeam…”
“What…?” a drunk boy murmured dumbly. Janine still didn’t think much of it, but was more curious now about the sing-song, inhuman-sounding dual-voices.
“Nasty to Maddi-eeee, now you’re gonna scree-eeam.”
Janine was staring for a while longer, then it clicked in her head and her feeling of suspense faded.
“It’s Emma Fucking Russell’s daughter,” she murmured loud enough for the whole camp to hear as she stood up, shouting into the dark woods beyond their concrete, tent-light lit encampment, “Sorry, Little Miss Braun, but your sad excuse for revenge isn’t working!”
The dual voice began whispering through the constant, warbling white noise on the iPod, “Close your eyes and count to ten… Better hope you don’t wake up again…”
“Urgh, this isn’t funny!” Janine shouted again into the darkness. But she seemed to be the only one at this point with such confidence, as some of the others around the LED camp began exchanging looks or seemed transfixed. “’Cause if it’s in a word… or if it’s in a book… You can’t get rid… of the Babadook.” Then two balls of red light glowed right back at Janine from amidst the forest’s blackness, side-by-side – two hellish glowing eyes, and with them the trees crackled audibly. Janine froze, time seeming to suspend for her.
Then the iPod all but exploded with a blast of hellish, wailing white noise, practically sparking, and it was like a gunshot amid a spooked herd – a girl in the camp screamed a high-pitched sound that failed to drown out the noise on the iPod, and everyone began frantically bolting, scattering. Not Janine though – she was petrified in place, staring into those twin, pupiless orbs of reddish light, and she wasn’t aware her skirt and thighs were wet until the urine was already dribbling into her shoe. She only started moving when Alex ran over and grabbed her, yelling at her.
The near-dozen teenagers sprinted into the black woods, scattered and uncoordinated, with no light to see but that of the half-moon in the sky which still left much of everything in shadow. One boy fell over something and frantically screamed on the ground after the others pleadingly not to leave him. The gathering of kids grew ever sparser amid the trees as they ran.
Then a sound somewhere between a leonine roar and a nasally shriek moaned loudly and reverberatingly out of the woods behind them – the terrible, moaning and otherworldly noise pushed reason further away to the recesses of the teenagers’ minds as panic took hold and they continued evacuating and scattering, screaming. None of them cared at all that the upward slope was the way back to the road as they went deeper into the forest, just wanting to keep moving as fast as they could if it’d keep them ahead of the thing.
Thump!
Janine and Alex, running together, never saw the club of wood swinging towards them before it knocked them both in the faces and sent them sprawling backward, landing on their backs in the dirt and moss. The figure who’d held the large branch, dressed in a black hoodie and camouflaged where they stood beside a tree trunk in the night, stood over them. The other teenagers were too busy frantically running deeper into the woods to notice or care, and rapidly disappeared. On the ground, Alex didn’t move, blood smeared on his face and his nose crooked at a broken angle. That made part of the brunette girl in the black hoodie feel satisfied.
The hoodie girl snapped a photo on her cellphone, the flash providing the illumination needed in the dark woods, of the sight on the ground: Alex with his handsome face smashed in, and Janine with her pee-stained skirt on clear display. If the hoodie girl was at all fazed by the thing in the woods which suddenly roared again, she didn’t show it – that leonine bellow however prompted Janine to suddenly move in a flurry, trying to scuttle up the slope a little before halting and seeing who was standing before her. She saw in the black hood half of Madison Russell’s face and hints of her brunette locks. A pause passed.
“You little bitch…” Janine hissed quietly, venomously – whether to spite what she thought was a ghost, or because she had enough brains and just enough mainstream Titan-knowledge to piece together Madison’s face and what was in the woods was anyone’s guess. Either way, the thundering of a hundred-plus-foot beast’s footfall crunching trees exploded behind Janine, and she might’ve fled if not for the demonic skull head looming forth from the darkness, mismatched eyes glinting in the depths of the helm-like skull’s black sockets, whilst a prominently female voice burst through whatever cellphones or iPods were in range.
“IF YOU EVER CROSS MY GIRL AGAIN, MY BROTHER AND I WILL COME BACK, AND THEN THERE WON’T BE ENOUGH OF YOU TO BURY.”
Janine gawked, held transfixed by the sight of the demon’s skull, then she sprung towards Alex on the ground and began frantically dragging and pulling at his arm like a doll, but when she couldn’t make him move after two seconds, she promptly scuttled on all fours along the forest ground past the hoodie – crawling like a baby, Madison thought, and she was darkly satisfied to record a few second of Janine frantically crawling past her like that before the high-schooler remembered she was a biped and ran into the darkness, leaving her unconscious boyfriend behind, far at the tail end of the scattering teenagers.
Madison watched her go, pulling the hood back from her tussled hair, and glancing back at Alex’s bloody face only long enough to confirm that he was indeed breathing and she hadn’t accidentally done something terrible. Now that she was (almost) alone, Madison checked over the photo and the video of Janine she’d taken on her cellphone’s bright-glowing screen whilst the black-and-silver Titan loomed behind her. She added a caption below the photo, a name that had popped into her head just two seconds ago and which she thought might be catchy and rhythmic enough to catch on among the other kids at school, so that Janine and the unconscious asshole next to her wouldn’t forget it anytime soon: Pee pee Janine. She uploaded the captioned photo to social media straight away, but would wait until she was back to civilisation where there was a better signal to upload the video. Her dad wouldn’t be approving of her posting this on the internet for everyone to see, and Madison had heard the talks about how serious humiliation on social media could get, but… Well, Janine (and Alex, as it turned out) were no strangers to shaming people on social media, having posted a few photos of their own of high-schoolers unconscious in bed with unpopular partners. Reap what you sow after all.
Madison heard the cracking of trees and the loud footfalls which vibrated through the soles of her shoes, but she was not in the slightest intimidated by the dark Titan approaching her at a seemingly leisurely strike. At the footfalls’ vibrations, bloody-faced Alex seemed to stir but didn’t wake. More trees crackled as the Titan bent and lowered its body down, bringing the elongated, skull-like head born out of a heavy metal album cover closer to Madison’s level. Madison grinned up at the Titan’s face like she were merely seeing a well-beloved aunt or grandmother again, and her cellphone hissed with activity.
“Got what you needed, slick?” the dual voices of Monster X asked. Madison vaguely recalled something, and she bent her knees and fished out something from the inert Alex’s pocket – his pocket, from which she took ten dollars before dumping the wallet – a bet’s a bet after all.
“Now I do,” Madison said, grinning. Monster X chuffed out a deep, reverberating sound like a coughing bull, a genuine smile spreading on the fearsome visage’s mouth below the natural skull helm. “Thanks for helping me out, Aunt Viv. You too, San.”
“Oh, there was no way those little shits were going to get away with it on my watch while I’m in the area,” Monster X replied, their dual voices holding a bear-ish undertone as their smile became rakish with their crushing teeth visible.
“They pissed them-selves – more than one of them,” San’s deep, soft growling voice took over to say, expecting the news to make Madison feel even better than she already did – and feel better she did, unable to bite back her giggle, which in turn made Monster X’s scarlet left eye practically light up with delight that the male half had gotten that reaction out of her. Now, Madison glanced back at Alex on the ground – Janine was gonna pay enough with those uploads to the internet once everyone in school saw it online, but him, Madison felt breaking his nose and leaving him looking less-than-handsome for a while wasn’t enough. Looking at him now, she seriously considered waiting until Monster X had left after their reunion, then dropping her pants and relieving her bladder on him. Hm…
<Randall Temple, Titan and Wildlife Photography Amateur Extraordinaire (Blog post)>
Date posted: 4/24/20██
[…]
Monster X was travelling south through North America on their return trip to their natural territory in Japan following the recent events further north, their route taking them through Pensacola, where Monarch is stationed. Apparently this ended up being quite unfortunate for several high-school students who’d been picking on Monarch operative Dr. Mark Russell’s and late eco-terrorist Emma Russell’s teenaged child. Let it just be said that the high-schoolers in question will have their work quite cut out for them salvaging their social image amongst their peers.
[Cropped, enhanced photograph of Monster X amid forestry, gallery of other images of Monster X]
After I took some photos of Monster X from a distance, I had the privilege of getting much closer for much better and clearer photos below. As you know, Monster X is uniquely capable of direct communication with people through a unique radio-wave manipulation, although when they noticed me, they gave me very little time to converse with them.
[Clear photograph of Monster X from a closer distance, glancing over their shoulder in the camera’s direction with a middle finger raised]
[…]