She'll thank Zeke later. If he lives. If she lives. If anyone does.
She turns her back on the tower and heads back outside. It's snowing now. She's... not dressed like she knew there was going to be snow in this dream. She's very cold, but it won't kill her. It's quieter now, too. Maybe the snow is muffling the screams, or maybe there are just fewer screams now that most of the city is dead. The sirens all sound weirdly muted.
She needs to find Billy. It's... sort of pointless, now that most of the city is dead, but she needs to keep going.
You need to look after the little kids -
Oh, but she should have seen it before, should have stayed focused, should have figured it out that first night at Father Michael's Batcave. But she didn't, and there's nothing for it now.
She turns around, and there's the mountain covered in snow. And she knows, the way you know in dreams, that she's left something important there.
It's a long climb. Her feet are cut open and bleeding by the time she reaches the top. A human would be dead. A vampire can't die, not of this, and so she keeps going, hour after arduous hour. She can't hear the sirens at all anymore. The city is gone. She has failed on every possible axis.
There's no garden at the top this time. There's a baseball diamond. In the middle of the diamond, sitting down and shivering in the snow, there is a boy.
"...hey Billy."
"Hey." He tucks his hand into his hospital gown in an effort to shield himself from the cold. "I'm sorry. I thought if I went to the mountain then maybe I wouldn't cause any more trouble for anyone, but - "
She shakes her head. "Don't worry about that." Not anymore. She sits down next to him in the snow and wishes that she had any way to warm him. "Do you think you could tell me what happened?"
"I'm trying to get away from the ugly man. He - he comes, and he comes, and no one can stop him."
She nods solemnly. "Do you know when the ugly man started chasing you?"
He looks up at the baseball diamond. "I - there was a game."
"A baseball game?"
"Yeah." He looks around and stands suddenly, hurting himself on the snow and the rocks, trying to get away. "He's here!"
Karen looks up. It's - well, it's an ugly man. He's disfigured. He's larger than her, but only regular big person large. He has a baseball cap on. His right hand isn't a hand at all, more of a massive fleshy club. He charges her.
She places herself between Billy and the ugly man, absorbing the first impact herself. She can feel her ribs breaking as the club slams into her. He feels like he's made of rock, almost, like she'll only ever hurt herself by hitting him.
She hits him anyway. Her hand breaks. She hits him with the other, and it hurts him, and that means he can be hurt. She kicks him as hard as she can, square in the chest, with no concern for how this is maybe going to shatter her entire leg, and the ugly man falls. She expects the hallucinations to end - he's down, this is the thing Billy was scared of, that should be enough - why isn't it enough -
She looks around at the baseball diamond.
"Can you tell me what happened during the game, Billy?"
He nods. But he doesn't. Images are overlaid on top of reality - insofar as there is a reality. Little boys run back to their cars. Billy is standing by the fence, distraught, when a man comes over to yell at him. He's dressed like the ugly man, but this one is just a man, no more or less frightening than any other. He tells Billy that he doesn't try, that it was his fault they lost, that he's a failure. He hits him. He hits him again, hard, and again, and again -
"Why?" she asks, not comprehending.
"It was my fault we lost," says Billy.
"Can you show me - "
Different images now - little boys running around the bases, throwing and catching balls. She doesn't even notice the mistake until Billy replays it, looping the moment of horror over and over again.
She wants to laugh at that split second moment when the baseball doesn't quite land in Billy's glove. Such a tiny thing. So much smaller than a life, than a city, than a world. But Billy is smaller than she is, so that makes sense. To him that moment is everything, is proof of what he is or isn't as a person, is proof that he's not enough.
(They are not enough. None of them. And yet.)
"I messed up," says Billy. "I didn't mean to, but - and then the nightmares came, and the ugly man kept hurting people, and - I didn't mean to hurt people, but I just kept making it worse - "
She picks him up. She holds him close and rocks him and lets him cling as much as he wants.
She needs to -
Billy needs to wake up. She needs to give him something that he can use to wake up. Some piece of wisdom that'll give him the strength to go on. But what moral is there to be found in all of this? Face your fears? That's a terrible moral, facing their fears has gotten them here. It's OK, you didn't mess up? He didn't, really, or if he did it was such a minuscule mistake that it she can't even weigh it when considering errors, but that's not going to ring true to him.
She thinks about what she would have said if she were Billy's coach, but she doesn't know if that'll come out properly, either.
What she says is, "Me too."
"Huh?"
"I messed up. I messed up a whole lot of times. My job is protecting people, but - obviously I'm not very good at it. I knew I had to help you, and I just kept getting distracted by other things." And Alex and Michael, they messed up too, they messed up in ways that she can't even analyze right now. "Everyone messes up, Billy. Everyone. Adults, kids, big supernatural beings as old as the rocks we're standing on, everyone. Sometimes they're small mistakes, and sometimes they're really, really big mistakes, and sometimes they're fixable and sometimes they're really, really not, but -
" - the thing is, when we make mistakes, we have some choices. We can pretend that we never messed up, because admitting it is too much for us to handle. We can try to go back and undo what we did, but - we can't, it's done, it's over. We did the things we did. We can give up, just sit still forever, just stop trying to accomplish anything. Or - or we can go forward. We can look at all the rotten stuff we've done, and all of the incompetent mistakes we made, and think that that's all we'll ever be. But I don't think it is. I think that if we keep going forward, then - yeah, we'll be our mistakes, but we'll be able to be the other things that we do, too, the things that happen after.
" - and I don't know, really, whether we're going to be able to come back from our mistakes. Maybe sometimes we can't. But I think - I really, really think - if we recognize what we did wrong, and we say we're sorry, and we resolve to try our best going forward, then - I think there's hope. I think there are things worth sticking around for. I think that anyone who can make that decision is someone who - can't fix things, maybe. But who can do more good stuff where they're at. You know? So - so I don't think that we should give up, Billy. I think - I think we should go forward. And maybe people will be able to forgive us, and maybe they won't, but if we give up here then we'll never find out, you know? And - I want to find out."
"I want to go home," says Billy.
"OK," she says. "Me too."
She carries him back to the hospital, the only building left in the endless blizzard. It takes hours to go back, so she tells stories, and sometimes she sings, and she prays that God will keep giving her the strength to take one more step. She carries him over bodies and broken medical equipment, over rotting animals and monster parts, into the room where his body lies, peaceful as ever.
"I'll be here," she says. "When you wake up."
He nods. He reaches out to touch his sleeping body.
And Billy Palmer wakes up.
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