The noise was deafening. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the booming sounds of raw, piercing screams. The sounds of humans gone utterly mad. Their blank, vicious bloodied faces was a sight taken from the depths of hell. No painter, not even Hieronymus Bosch, could have even imagined what she and Jon were seeing.
If there was a hell, this was it.
It was too much. A coldness descended upon her soul, as if the temperature of the world had suddenly dropped.
She was chilled down to her bones, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air but the situation of the world. It froze her mind, too. She looked up at Jon, opening her mouth then closing it again. She wanted to tell him she couldn’t do this, couldn’t observe this massive vision of hell any longer but her lungs wouldn’t fill with enough air to form the words. She could barely breathe.
But Jon somehow understood. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her to him. Oh God. Warmth. He was this huge column of warm muscle. She leaned into him, trying to absorb some of his warmth, take it into herself.
“Come, Sophie. You’re in shock.”
Jon led her into the bedroom and made her get under the covers. She could barely walk, had to think about putting one foot in front of the other. Had to actively try not to stumble.
She didn’t have to think about not falling down though. Jon had a big arm around her waist and she felt like she couldn’t fall down. He wouldn’t let her.
On the way to the bed, Jon grabbed a cashmere throw across her sofa and wrapped it around her. Once she was sitting in bed, covers up to her chin, the throw around her shoulders, she knew intellectually she shouldn’t be feeling any cold, but she was. It was all-pervasive, muscle and bone deep. No amount of swaddling could dissipate it.
Jon disappeared. While he was gone it was no-Jon time. Time that didn’t matter, wasn’t observable. She neither thought nor felt. It was like being in suspended animation. She couldn’t even register the booming, crashing noises from outside. Her bedroom looked out over an internal courtyard so the noises came over the rooftops.
A huge boom sounded, not a human noise. Some explosion somewhere. These were all thoughts that drifted through her mind without her understanding them fully.
“Here.” Startled, she looked up. Jon had a steaming cup of something on one of her pretty flower-themed trays. “Drink it all down.”
He put his big hand under the cup when she picked it up. He’d been right to. She seemed to have lost all muscle strength. The cup bobbled in her hand and the hot liquid would have splashed on her, burned her, if he hadn’t steadied it.
His eyes were as steady as his hands. “Drink,” he said quietly.
She drank. Coughed. Her vanilla tea had been laced with plenty of the aged Glenfiddich she kept on a sideboard. There was honey in there too. A drink she definitely needed.
He stood by the bedside until she drank the entire concoction, then moved to the other side of the bed, removed his boots and got under the covers with her. With his back against the headboard, he reached for her, snuggled her against him.
The hot tea, the hot man. Warmth penetrated and with it, the numbness that had protected her dissipated.
It was all too much. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept.
Jon heldSophie as she cried. It wasn’t an emotional crying jag like some women had, to get rid of stress. This was harsher, deeper, more desperate. It was a lament for the world. It was endless, bottomless grief.
He didn’t even try to shush her or comfort her with words. There were no words, anyway. He simply held her. He held her at that moment not as a man held a woman he was falling for, but as a comrade held a fallen teammate. Sophie was grievously wounded and if the wound wasn’t actually bleeding, it was deadly nonetheless.
Sophie cried as if something inside her was broken, beyond healing.
Jon understood that, down to his bones. His world had been broken beyond healing in childhood.
She had one hand clutching his neck and the other holding his side. He held her tightly, one hand along her narrow back, feeling the stuttering rise and fall of her back as she sobbed and gasped for air. She was crying with her entire body, every muscle clenched in grief. In her bedroom, the sounds of the world outside were muted, her sobs audible above the shrieks and yells of the infected.
Jon held her more tightly. The world was drowning and the woman who held the key to healing was grieving in his arms. They had a perilous mission to undertake. She needed to vent her emotions now, in a safe environement, in his arms. A meltdown like this in the field would be deadly.
He couldn’t fault her, though. The depth of her sorrow was a sign of the depth of her emotions. She wouldn’t be what she was if she couldn’t feel the horror of what was happening down to her very soul.
Something, some primordial instinct, told Jon that Sophie Daniels had never encountered the full depravity of the world. Granted, this was far worse than the depravity and heartlessness Jon had seen in his parents and their drug-addled ‘friends’. This was the whole world falling, not one small corner of it. But he felt as if he’d been somehow inoculated against the grief she was feeling, able to bear up under its terrible burden. If there was anyone who could understand her, and stand for her, it was him.
So he held her, giving her the warmth and the unspoken support of his body while she cried out her rage and frustration and despair. She wept hot tears, holding nothing back. It wasn’t female tears of frustration, they were the tears of a soul in torment. She wept until she could barely breath, breaths coming in shaking gasps. Her heart fluttered under his hand, fast and heavy, as if she were running a marathon. He tucked her more tightly against him, her tears making his tee shirt damp. He didn’t care. She needed this. He almost envied her. Many times in his life he wished he could have wept out his rage and hatred and despair, but he never could. He just put it away somewhere deep inside where he could pretend it had dissipated.
Sophie wept a storm and, like all storms, it was too violent to last. She finally cried herself out through sheer exhaustion.
The sobs quieted, stopped. She was leaning heavily against him, as if without his support, she’d collapse. That was fine. Jon would be her support for as long as she needed it. Beyond, even.
Her heart rate under his hand slowed, her breathing slowed too, became regular. Finally she was quiet. He lifted his head and looked down at her. All he could see were absurdly long eyelashes clumped together from the tears and pale, high cheekbones. She was so still, the quiet after the storm. He hoped she’d fallen asleep. She needed to rest. Rest healed, he knew that. Just like he knew that she was going to be caught up in the lab in Haven as soon as they arrived. From what he understood, the lab was working around the clock and she seemed as dedicated as Catherine and Elle. She’d hit the ground running and would work around the clock, too.
