As We Know It
Chapter 9Zac had spent a good five hours in front of the keyboard that day, pulling together notes, words, and ideas, all of them mixing together in his head to create one giant, jumbled mess.
This was the most important thing he was going to do in his whole life, and he was going to fuck it up, he was sure of it.
Zac felt something curl itself around his ankles, and looked down at the fuzzy visage of a patchy black and white cat, its piercing yellowish eyes staring back up at him. When Lilly had mentioned his very own hell hound as part of the bargain, this hadn't been quite what he had envisioned. Technically, cats weren't allowed in his apartment, though hell beasts weren't mentioned in the lease, so he didn't feel too bad.
"Whiskers, are you hungry?" Zac asked, reaching a hand out to pet it gently - Whiskers the Hell Beast purred in approval.
Zac stood to grab a can of tuna from the cupboard, Whiskers following at his heels in a decidedly not hellish and very much cat-like way. He had adapted to having her thre quite well despite the fact that she had simply been left in his apartment one day with a note from Lilly that said "Enjoy." So far, she hadn't done all that much to show that she was evil, except the fact that she had already bitten Taylor twice. Mostly, she ate and she slept, which Zac figured was just as well - that was all he wanted to do anymore, and he was supposed to be evil too.
While Whiskers was nibbling happily at her dinner, Zac ignored his own growling stomach and sat back down at the keyboard. He touched down on a couple of keys, restless. Before he could continue, he heard a slow clapping behind him; it sounded smart ass and sarcastic enough that he didn't even need to turn around to know who was there.
"You know, I do have a door, and you're welcome to occasionally knock on it before you barge inside."
"Oh, but that would take away the element of surprise, and you know how much I like that. Like how I was hoping to get here and find out that you've actually gotten somewhere with this - surprise!"
"Excuse me, but this is really a lot of pressure on me to do something good, ok? I don't want this to be half assed. Even you said, it has to be done carefully, or it won't work out the right way."
"Yes, but more importantly, it needs to actually be done at some point."
"Relax, we still have a week until the big kick-off show, and that's all that matters in the end, right?" Zac went to turn back to his keyboard when he heard a knock on the door - he looked at the time and groaned; it was too late for Taylor to be making some kind of randomly inspired visit, so it must have been something else. He was in no mood to deal with any kind of emergency.
"Now that's the way you're supposed to greet someone - actually letting them know you're there," Zac said with a smirk, turning his attention to Lilly. She didn't have the usual sardonic expression that she usually had before she came back with some sort of cutting remark. Instead she looked pale, even frightened.
"Don't answer that yet," she said, her voice light and warning.
"It's probably just Taylor, maybe he forgot something when he was over here last night. Although, it would probably look weird if you were here with me this late, so maybe you should" By the time Zac had reached that point, Lilly was nowhere to be seen. He glanced back and forth, scanning the immediate area for her, but saw nothing.
"God, you're weird," he muttered to himself, and opened the front door.
It wasn't his brother standing there to greet him when he opened the door, it wasn't even a distant relative. The woman standing on his doorstep was someone he had never seen before in his life, and when he came to his senses enough to process the sight, he noticed that there were three other women standing behind her.
"Hi," Zac said, uneasy with the situation and more than a little worried that he was about to get robbed by four incredibly tiny girls. "Can I help you with something?"
"Actually, you can," the woman standing in the doorway said, a wry smile across her lips, her cropped red hair framing her face like flames. She was already on the threshold of the door, so close to Zac that it was almost an unspoken threat.
"I'd be happy to give you directions to a much nicer apartment only ten minutes from here if you'd like to rob him instead." The woman grinned at Zac's remark, and he took a step back into the room.
"Actually, it's you we wanted to see," she said, letting herself inside. Whiskers, who had been watching this from the safety of her own favorite spot on the sofa, hid beneath the bed. Zac felt like that wasn't exactly an incentive to speak, so he remained silent as the other three women followed after the red head, who appeared to be their leader. He took the opportunity to take a closer look at the others then, and he took another step back.
The woman who immediately followed after the redhead was a small dirty blonde, and her clothes were ragged and torn, her skin an ashen color, her eyes grey. The next girl was tall and thin - not simply thin, but as close to the walking definition of death as it got.
When he looked at the last girl, she seemed oddly normal compared to the others. Her skin was sallow and pale, but she otherwise just looked like a normal girl. Still, she had a presence about her that made it clear to Zac that while the redhead was the strength of the group, this last girl was the real power.
"He's cute," the blonde said, a malicious smile coming across her face. "Let's keep him."
"Down girl," the redhead said, her eyes scanning Zac up and down, assessing him, and taking a few evenly paced steps. It wasn't until then that Zac realized that the four of them were slowly circling around him. He was feeling more like they were in the middle of some kind of nature lesson, and he was the prey.
"Who are you?" Zac asked when he finally found his voice. He quietly acknowledged the fact that he had been having to ask that question much more than was probably normal in the past few weeks, and he almost never liked the answer.
"We're back up," the redhead spoke again, all of the girls coming to a stop. "People have a lot of names for us. The Four, the Horsemen, bringers of destruction. But when I'm on my time off, I just prefer War."
Zac looked at the girls again, a chill running down his spine. He recognized them now - in a weird sense, he felt like he knew them, better than he knew himself.
"And what do you want?" Zac asked, thought he felt stupid to even have to ask the question as they were all staring at him expectantly.
"The usual. Death, destruction, the end of the world," the impossibly thin girl responded.
"But what do you want from me?"
"I'm not surprised that you're completely uninformed about this whole thing, they did put Lilly on this job with you," War said with a smirk.
"Where is the little angel anyway?" the blonde asked.
"She's not around," Zac said, grateful that it wasn't entirely a lie.
"Well, when you see her, give her a message. Let her know that this is her only chance - if this doesn't go exactly the way it needs to, she's not even going to be able to beg for mercy."
"Got that. No mercy," Zac said, her voice shaky. He was wishing more and more that they would go away and leave him alone. The redhead - War, he thought, a chill running through him - watched him as though his thoughts were plain as day on his face.
"It's time to head out now," War said, giving the others a curt nod before looking to Zac again. "We'll be waiting on your orders, but we won't be waiting too long."
Zac felt a hint of relief as the four of them began to file out of the door - but it was a false, stressful relief, almost like the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders, but then replaced with a new, heavier one, with sharp pointy things sticking out of it. Sure, they weren't standing in his apartment anymore, but they were waiting on him to deliver the orders that would bring an end to the world. He didn't really see this as a win-lose situation, as much as an everybody-loses situation.
And he thought writing a song was hard enough.
"I don't know where you are, but I'm sure that you can hear me," Zac said to the empty room. "I really think that you need to explain yourself right now."
Under the bed, Whiskers watched him carefully, her tail whipping back and forth anxiously. Zac crossed his arms and waited. When he turned around again, he saw Lilly there, traced of the pale, panicked expression still visible on her face.
"Really, that was just great, stranding me with those girls. Really nice."
"I don't think it's really part of my job to be nice," Lilly muttered, moody. "Anyway, they have to listen to you, they could hav every well done whatever they liked to me. And I can think of quite a few things they'd have liked to do to me."
"They said ‘hi' by the way," Zac said with a scowl. "And possibly something about no mercy? Whatever happened to that whole very-important-downstairs thing you told me you had going on?"
"Well, about that... I'm sort of working freelance at the moment."
"I gathered as much, they were pretty adamant about having your head on a stick if this wasn't to their liking..."
Lilly crossed her arms as Zac spoke, seemingly irritated, though Zac suspected it was to cover her poorly hidden nerves.
"Sheesh, you do one thing wrong, and they hold it against you for a thousand years or something."
"Yeah, hell can be a pain in the ass like that, huh?"
Lilly did not seem to appreciate Zac's input, but he continued regardless.
"What could you have possibly done that's so bad even hell won't take you back?"
"I'm kind of a rogue like that. Very dangerous," she added, after a pause.
"But why?" Zac said, detecting a sense of worry in her voice - a tone that he had barely heard from her before this. Lilly didn't say anything at first, so Zac pressed on. "What would make the four horsemen themselves react like that? It had to be something bad, like, something worse than what we're doing now. And this is pretty fucking bad."
"Just shut up about it," she said, genuine shame coming through in her voice.
"No," Zac said, paused as he began to understand. "It couldn't have possibly been because of something that you did wrong. It must have been because of something that you did that was good." Zac stopped, waiting for Lilly to react, and bracing himself for the storm. She didn't react, however, and simply turned away from him to leave.
"I need to get out of here. Next time I stop by, you'd better have some real progress for me, or there's going to be an issue."
Zac looked at Lilly in wonder as she walked away from him, because knowing this about her, knowing that she could feel like that changed something. For the first time since he had met her, Zac could truly envision her as a human being.