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Meryl ducks against the side of the van as a worm swoops overhead, close enough that the wind of its wings dislodges her hat. She grabs it on instinct and scrabbles backward in the sand until her back hits a sun-baked tire. Gunfire rings out and she cringes at the volume, shakily loading her derringer.
The worms swoop by again, a dozen of them, the big ones that are almost-but-not-quite too big to fly, stingers flashing in the sunlight. There’s a crack of Vash’s revolver and one of them goes down in a splat of green blood, but the whine of the others’ wings only grows louder.
Meryl finishes loading the little gun and hesitates. She knows she’s supposed to stay out of the firefights. She knows not to split Vash and Wolfwood’s attention between whatever they’re shooting at and trying to keep an eye on her. But she hates cowering. It’s like sand in her bra, having to hide in the van’s shadow like this. She thumbs the derringer’s stubby barrel and sets her teeth as another gunshot rattles Meryl’s skull. A worm falls from the sky to hit the roof of the van with a thump.
Wolfwood yells something from someplace Meryl can’t see. It’s followed by a sharp string of machine gun fire and a swirl of dust that sweeps over the van like a storm. Meryl puts her sleeve over her face and squints into the haze.
A shape comes at her, too fast to think.
And Meryl hesitates.
It’s stupid. She knows it’s stupid even as she does it, finger on the trigger but not pulling it, because she worries for an instant that it’s Vash, and if she shoots Vash by mistake she’ll feel like shit about it — but of course it isn’t Vash.
The worm slams into her and it feels like she’s been hit by a car, the air leaving her lungs all at once in a strangled yelp, the gun flying from her hand as she and the worm crash sideways into the sand, kicking up more dust. They’re so close she can feel the buzz of its wings in her teeth. It sounds angry. They always go for the ones most afraid of them, Meryl’s dad always said, like how cats love to rub up on the legs of the one poor asshole in the room who’s allergic.
But before Meryl can panic too thoroughly, another gunshot sounds, so close it really does hurt her ears, and the worm goes limp. Meryl sucks in a breath full of dust, coughs on it, and blinks in the haze as someone drags the worm off of her. It’s almost as long as she is tall.
“Did it get you?” Vash is asking as he pulls her upright, his gun still smoking but at least back in its holster as he brushes sand from Meryl’s clothes, looking her over for blood. “Are you okay?”
Meryl shakes the shock off a little and takes stock of herself. “I think so?” she manages around the sand in her mouth. She spits dryly and flexes her fingers. Nothing seems broken. An ache in her right side is making itself known — probably where the worm came crashing into her.
Vash wheels, drawing his gun so fast that Meryl doesn’t actually see him do it, and shoots another of the worms out of the sky. Meryl takes the opportunity to lift the hem of her shirt and look herself over.
A nasty bruise is blooming dark across her ribs already, and she can tell it’s only going to get worse, but a cursory glance doesn’t reveal any blood or punctures. Looks like she avoided a sting this time.
All worms can sting. Meryl learned that very young. Everyone does, even in November, well outside the usual territory of the big ones like these. Even the larvae have a little stinger, but their venom is immature and only causes a few hours of burning before it wears off. The big ones carry nastier stuff. Meryl’s heard of horrific allergic reactions, stories from caravaners who swear up and down that one of their coworker’s friend’s sister’s bosses got stung once and turned blue and swelled up like a waterskin and died before he hit the ground.
Meryl’s father always said worm allergies were rare, and it wasn’t the venom you needed to worry about anyway. Worm venom carries a reactive isotope that other worms can pick up on. If one stings you and you get away, others will follow you to finish what the first one started.
Meryl’s stomach rolls uneasily. She ducks to grab her derringer out of the sand, flips the safety back on, and stuffs it in her coat. “Are they gone?” she asks Vash.
He eyes the sky for a moment, gun ready, smoke still drifting from the barrel, and then nods, holstering it. “Yeah. Yeah, we’re okay. Wolfwood?”
Wolfwood answers from the other side of the van. “Clear over here.”
Meryl gets the driver’s side door open and clambers in, ignoring the way her side shrieks in protest. “Then I vote we get moving before they come back.”
The boys follow her lead without protest.
-
The ache in her side grows with every bump and jolt of the van until Meryl has to bite her cheek to keep her focus on the stretch of sand in front of them. She knows it’s only a bad bruise, and she isn’t going to be a little bitch about a bad bruise, even if it is turning hot and lancing pain into her stomach with her pulse. She grips the wheel tighter and tries to adjust her posture to stretch it out a little, but that only makes it flash with a fiery burn.
Wolfwood, riding shotgun, looks up from lighting his crumpled cigarette. “You okay?” he asks below the rumble of the engine and the blood pounding in Meryl’s ears.
“It’s just a bruise.” If she says it enough it’ll be true. She didn’t see blood. There wasn’t a puncture. It wasn’t a sting. She suddenly, contrarily, wants Wolfwood to call bullshit.
He takes a drag of his cigarette and lets the matter go.
In the backseat, Vash is snoring gently.
-
Three hours after the fight with the worms, Meryl slams on the brakes, dragging the van to a violent, squealing halt.
“Christ!” Wolfwood yelps, grabbing the dashboard.
Vash makes some sort of Noise as he winds up on the floorboards in the backseat.
Meryl pays no attention to either of them, barely remembering to throw the van in park, wrenching her door open and sliding down into the burning sand, landing hard on her knees, and empties her stomach into the wasteland.
It hurts. Her side is throbbing and on fire and tingling all at once, and every cramp of her stomach sends a new wave of pain right through her middle, to say nothing of the acid in her throat. She reaches for the side of the van blindly, hoping for some support.
She gets Vash’s shoulder instead as he kneels beside her, one hand slipping around her waist, the other pulling her hair back. He’s saying something that Meryl can’t hear over her own pitiful retching and coughing.
A shadow falls across her from her right side, a shadow that smells like shitty cigarettes, and Wolfwood is saying something now too, and Meryl realizes how nice it is to have someone holding her sort-of upright because now she’s dizzy, so she holds on to Vash’s shoulder just a little tighter and squeezes her eyes shut against the swimming desert. At least she’s stopped throwing up. Her right hand tingles like it’s fallen asleep.
“— said she wasn’t stung,” Vash is saying. “There’s no blood.”
“Just ‘cause it didn’t draw blood doesn’t mean it didn’t get something in her.” Wolfwood’s hand tips Meryl’s chin up. “Hey. Hey. Eyes open. Look at me.”
Meryl doesn’t especially like being told what to do, but Wolfwood sounds urgent, so she cracks her eyes open against searing sunlight to squint at him. “Mm?” she manages. Her mouth tastes like stomach acid.
“Where’d it get you?” Wolfwood shakes her by the chin, just a little, when her eyes start to slip closed again. It’s just so bright, she wants to whine. It’s too bright. “Meryl. Where’d it get you?”
Her mouth is so, so dry. She licks her lips. “Ribs,” she mumbles, or something like it.
It isn’t terribly coherent, but Wolfwood seems to understand, releasing her chin and pulling up the hem of her shirt. “Shit,” he hisses.
Meryl closes her eyes again.
“What?” Vash demands.
“Yeah, it got her. Got her good. Fucking stinger’s still in there. That’s why there wasn’t any goddamn blood, fucking — get her in the backseat, now, now, it’s been there for fucking hours.”
Vash scoops her up like a kitten with no visible effort. It’s dizzying — nauseating — for a split second Meryl wants to cry out, but she maintains just enough of a grip on herself to bite her tongue and keep her eyes closed. Her stomach rolls. She buries her face in Vash’s ragged red coat and draws a deep and shaky breath. It smells like gunpowder and sweat.
Then she’s being laid so, so gently in the van’s backseat, the boys saying things to each other or to her (she’s not sure which) and something Happens to her bruise that makes it tingle and burn and freeze and shriek, and Meryl would rather be unconscious than present for it, so she goes away for a while.
-
She wakes in the passenger seat, drenched in sweat, to the sound of a very nearby gunshot.
The van swerves, knocking Meryl’s forehead against the window, and Wolfwood says from somewhere, “Fucking hell, Blondie, keep them off us!”
“Working on it!” Vash snaps, and there’s three more gunshots in quick succession. “Can you drive any worse?”
“Sure, let me drive us off a fucking c—” The van swerves again and Wolfwood cuts himself off with a sharp inhale. “Shit, shit, shit! New swarm up ahead!”
“Go around.” Vash sounds serious, which jars Meryl more than anything else. Vash doesn’t do serious.
“Go around, he says.” Wolfwood huffs a humorless laugh. The van’s engine kicks into a higher gear with a whine. “Just go around the swarm.”
“It’s better than going through it!” Vash punctuates this with another shot, then the snap-clink of emptying the revolver’s spent rounds, the rapid fire click of a reload. Meryl doesn’t have to turn and look — she doesn’t even have to open her eyes. She knows it by heart. It dawns on her that they just might be in trouble. She makes a noise against her will.
“We’re okay,” Wolfwood says over the whine of the engine. He sounds surer than he did a minute ago. “We’ll be okay.”
Meryl wants to point out that those are two different things, but she can only manage a sucking gasp that makes her ribs throb. Her entire right side is numb. That’s probably bad.
Her father leans in from the backseat to whisper in her ear. “Reactive isotopes that the other worms can pick up on.” His breath smells like bread. “If one stings you and you get away, the others will follow you to finish what the first one started.”
Meryl squeezes her eyes shut again and tries to take deep breaths and tells herself that her father is home in November, probably sending letters to her office, and there’s no way he’s here in her van in a biblical-scale cloud of worms in the ass end of nowhere. She misses him. She doesn’t write home enough.
The van shudders and rockets over a sand dune, catching air for a split second. Meryl knows that without opening her eyes because she knows this van like the back of her hand, and she knows that jolt when the wheels touch down again and the bend of the shock absorbers and the little wobble that comes afterwards. She wants to snap at Wolfwood to be careful, god’s sake, this is their only car, but her mouth won’t work.
Eight gunshots, all in a row, then the sound of Vash reloading again.
“How much ammo do you have?” Wolfwood asks through gritted teeth.
“Enough,” Vash lies. Meryl knows it’s a lie because she pries her eyes open and can’t see the suns through the window, only a shifting cloud of wings and compound eyes. They thrum against the van and blot out the sky. Vash is good but he can only carry so many bullets. Meryl tries to clench her fists but she can’t feel her right hand anymore. She manages to tip her head down. Her hand lies limp in her lap, puffy and swollen and red. Red like a dying Plant.
Now the panic is starting to settle in.
The shifting shadows outside grow darker and louder. The whine of the worms blends into the whine of the engine. The revolver cracks from the backseat.
Meryl can’t just do nothing. She wants to dig her derringer from her pocket and take a few potshots out the window with Vash, but her left hand is slow to respond.
The ocean rises outside. It’s bright blue like the expensive cocktails Meryl used to drink in college, almost fluorescent, brighter than a summer sky. It’s pretty. She’s seen pictures of the ocean in books and she knows it doesn’t look like this, but it’s pretty. It buzzes with motion. A too-close gunshot rattles her teeth.
The others will follow, her father says from the ocean.
She can’t sit and do nothing. The ocean will take them, Vash and Wolfwood, if Meryl does nothing.
She focuses on her left hand, willing it to move. It feels like her nerves are full of pancake syrup, but at least she can’t feel the pain in her side anymore. Her left hand rises, slowly, as weak and wobbly as a baby thomas, but it rises. Meryl concentrates.
If she can get the door open, at the speed Wolfwood is driving, she should tumble out and be in the buzzing ocean with only the pull of a lever. The worms will have her and they’ll stop chasing the van. Her boys will escape. They’ll be safe. This, Meryl can do for them.
The ocean sparkles. Meryl’s mother sings a song made of thrumming wings and gunshots. Her father’s breath smells of bread and gunpowder and shitty cigarettes. Her hand shakes as it closes over the door handle. One quick pull.
The ocean batters the van’s sides, the windshield, the roof. The breaking waves sound like angry worms. They go after whoever’s the most scared of them. They go after reactive isotopes. They will pull Meryl apart like freshly baked bread before she hits the sand.
The van swerves. Someone yanks her by the wrist, hard enough to hurt, shouting over the buzzing wings, the whining engine, the crack of Vash’s gun. Meryl cries out — she can’t help it — it hurts, and her half coherent plan foiled, and the gunshots are so close they hurt her ears, and the ocean is looming and made of worms and has gone from cocktail-blue to a menacing green and Wolfwood won’t let go of her wrist no matter how she twists and tugs.
Shapes swirl into sounds and sounds swirl into tastes and tastes swirl into the ocean like a draining bath.
-
She wakes, but it isn’t waking, because she was already awake, slurring something to Vash about the ocean and about her father and baby thomases and Wolfwood’s shitty cigarettes. There is sweat in her eyes and it stings and she cries.
Vash, nodding absently, reloads his gun one-handed. The ocean-blue crystal of his prosthetic is on Meryl’s shoulder, pinning her down to the rough upholstery of the van’s backseat. Over his shoulder, the window is open just an inch, just wide enough to fit the muzzle of a gun. “Yeah?” he says over the engine, over the wings. “Keep telling me. Okay? Just hold on.”
There are shrieking masses beyond the window, bodies with wings and stingers, but Meryl can see the sky through the heaving worms. She can see sunlight.
-
She next wakes, properly wakes, because the van has stopped, and it feels strange to not be in motion. She comes around with a jolt.
“No, hey, it’s okay,” and Vash’s ocean-blue crystal pins her down again, ever so gently. “Be careful.”
There is machine gun fire outside. Sunlight filters through the windows in a haze of smoke.
Meryl tries to say something and it comes out in a rasp.
Vash seems to know what she means anyway. “Wolfwood’s outside. It’s okay. We’re okay. Can you drink something for me?” The arm holding her down changes tack to lift her up — gently, so fucking gently she wants to cry — to sit upright, a canteen at her lips.
Meryl wants to ask more questions, but the water hits her tongue and her mind goes blank with how thirsty she suddenly is. Vash pulls it back after a few moments and the loss of it drags a sad noise out of her.
“I know,” he says. “In a minute.”
The gunfire outside subsides.
“Wolfwood,” Meryl manages. Her voice sounds wrecked.
“Don’t worry about him,” Vash says. “How do you feel? You’ve been…” He pauses. “In and out.”
She considers the question. “Bad.”
It wrings a smile from him, the fragile one when he doesn’t really mean it. “You scared us,” he says. The van is still full of gunsmoke. Sunlight punctures the clouds of it like a million knives.
“Sorry,” she manages. Her lips are so dry she can feel them crack as she says it.
“No, just — don’t apologize. Here. Small sips.” The canteen is offered again.
Meryl tastes blood from her lips as she swallows.
The door up front opens and then slams shut. “I think we’re clear,” Wolfwood says, dumping the Punisher into the passenger seat. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s awake, I think. You awake?”
“Think so.” Speech is a little easier now, but all her nerves still feel full of pancake syrup.
“Good,” Wolfwood grunts. “Now we get to be pissed.”
“Don’t be pissed at her,” Vash says.
“I’ll be pissed if I want to be pissed.” Wolfwood turns to level Meryl with a look behind his sunglasses that makes her heart sink a little. “You tried to jump.”
She did. She remembers it. “I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
“Can we not, right now?” Vash looks from Meryl to Wolfwood. “How about, I don’t know, hooray, we escaped this time, what a relief, let’s hold each other and count our blessings?”
Wolfwood turns back around and busies himself with wrapping the Punisher back up. The silence is extremely pointed. Oh, he’s going to have words for her later, Meryl knows it.
She makes a clumsy grab for the canteen. Her good hand only sort of thunks against it. Her right hand barely twitches. But it does twitch. It looks less red. Less like a dying Plant, more like a sunburn.
“They’re gone?” she finally asks Vash as he puts the canteen to her lips again.
“Yeah, they’re gone. Small sips,” he reminds her.
She tries. “I saw… the ocean?”
“Yeah, you… mentioned that, a little. Like I said, you’ve been in and out.” Vash doesn’t meet her eyes.
Wolfwood turns over the engine and the van groans to life. “Worm venom can make people see all kinds of crazy shit,” he says, and Meryl feels a little triumphant that he can’t keep giving her the silent treatment. He glances back at her, eyebrows drawn tightly together. “Blondie, how’s it looking?”
Vash tugs the hem of Meryl’s shirt up, a little apologetic look crossing his face. If Meryl had more energy, she’d tell him it was fine, that she’s got nothing he hasn’t seen before, but talking is hard and her veins are full of syrup. “Better,” Vash says. “Not by much, but better. Meryl, can you feel this?”
It sparkles and freezes and burns when he presses down, despite how gently he does it. “Yeah,” she grits out.
The pressure stops. “Sorry. But it’s good there’s some feeling coming back.”
Wolfwood snorts and puts the van in gear. “It’s good she’s not allergic, or we’d really have been fucked,” he says gruffly. Meryl catches him looking at her in the rear view mirror. His voice softens, just a little. “Hey. Get some more sleep, okay?”
Meryl wants to say several things, like I’m sorry I scared you and thank you for driving and thank you for saving me and I don’t write home enough and I would lay down my life for either of you, any day, even though you wouldn’t let me. She says none of them. She lays her head on Vash’s leg and gets some more sleep.