Contagion

“You’d call me a murderer, Jack?” Reaper asked, eyebrow raised.

But right then, Jack didn’t care. So much had happened that he was finding it difficult to care about anything. He was withdrawn, distant from everyone and everything, prisoner of his own guilt and struggling to see light anywhere. The sun was down now, over London and in his mind. Darkness ruled.

Outside, something cried out in the night. He listened, but it was not human. Rhali was still lost.

“But you led them to us!” Jenna said. “Why the hell would you do that? Why would you think that was anything like a good idea?”

“We weren’t sure they were following.”

“Bullshit!” Jenna shouted. Reaper flinched, face stern. But he did not respond. “What, were you scared? When you found you couldn’t shout someone apart? And are you so-called Superiors just the thickest crusts of dog shit on the shittiest covered shit-shoe in the history of shit? Are you? Huh? You’ve wiped out pretty much everyone who can do something about the bomb, and now we’ve got the last one here, you lead the Choppers right to us!” She looked ready to rage some more, but her fury seemed to wane as quickly as it had risen. She pointed at Lucy-Anne. “And look what happens.” Her voice was suddenly lighter, sadder. “Just look.”

Lucy-Anne was sleeping in the corner of the large room. It had been a nightclub of some sort at one point, probably turned into a drinking club soon before Doomsday. There were no bodies in here, but plenty of canned drinks and bottled water, and crisps and nuts. The main attraction, though, was its lack of windows. They were shut off in here. Jack wondered whether, if he really thought about it, he could cut himself off from everything that had happened outside.

But he could still smell the blood and feel the desperation of his friends.

He was tired. Sparky’s wounds had been simple to tend to. He’d be scarred, but Jack had stopped the bleeding and knitted flesh where his two worst lacerations lay open to the bone. But Lucy-Anne’s wound was far different. The bullet had passed clean through her face, but in doing so it had done major damage. Her lower jaw was broken, teeth smashed, cheekbones cracked. Her broken teeth had been driven into her throat, and if it hadn’t been for Nomad opening an airway—a finger tracheotomy—Lucy-Anne would have suffocated.

As it was, Jack had eased her pain with a touch, but try as he might he’d not been able to reset the bones. Perhaps there were some who could. He had seen Rosemary’s friend operate on Jenna to retrieve a bullet without opening her up. But right now, such damage was beyond his talents. She moaned, unconscious. Nomad slumped beside her, asleep herself. Nomad frightened Jack, because she gave off a heat and a stink that only he could sense. He thought she was dying, but she hadn’t said a thing since they’d broken into the club. He’d moved close to her once to try to wake her up, but the heat and smell had driven him away.

The stench of death. And the heat, for all he knew, of hell.

“I was wrong,” Reaper said.

“What?” Jack said, aghast.

“I was—”

“I heard what you said!” He could barely even look at the man. Frightening, powerful, inhuman, to hear him utter such words disturbed Jack as much as anything else. It made him realise how much was changing, and how useless everything had become.

“So now what?” Sparky said. “I mean, thanks for sorting me out, mate. And for Lucy-Anne…for doing as much as you can for her. But now what? Rhali’s gone. Your charming dad’s gang are mostly dead or gone. Apart from Mrs. Frost there. And Hayden’s had his brains blown out.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I know all that.”

“So you’ve got a plan?” Sparky said. “Cos we’re shit out of time.”

“No plan,” Jack said. “Other than, just…” He shrugged, because what he was going to suggest was no plan at all.

“What?” Sparky asked. “Tell us. You sound like you’ve given up, and you can’t sound like that. I won’t let you.”

“You saved us all back there,” Jenna said, and she cut straight to the core of what was torturing Jack. Not the bomb, or Hayden’s death, or even Rhali’s disappearance. It was the fact that he had killed again that made everything seem so pointless. He knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t alter the way he thought. Even if everything worked out fine, he had killed to make it happen. A world where that was the price was perhaps not a world worth saving.

“Maybe,” Jack said. “Or perhaps I just made your pain go on a little longer.”

“What, you wish we’d all been killed?” Jenna asked.

“Screw that,” Sparky said. “And screw you. I’m going for the bomb even if you’re not.”

“Me too,” Jenna said. She was sitting beside Sparky, grasping his hand tightly in hers as if she would never again let him go.

“I’m so scared of myself,” Jack said. He looked at Nomad but she was still slumped beside Lucy-Anne, as if echoing the girl’s state. He’d started to hate the woman for what she’d turned him into. His gifts should have brought only good, but instead he’d become a killer.

Just like his father.

“Are you scared of me?” he asked Reaper.

“I’m scared for you,” Reaper replied. He looked like Jack’s father, but that was because he was trying. Stripped of his power, he was using other means to advance whatever his cause might be. Give him his powers again and he’ll be as much a monster as ever, Jack thought. He snorted and turned away.

Lucy-Anne was looking at him. He caught his breath and went to her, and when they saw she was awake the others gathered around as well. Sparky held Jack’s arm and Jenna pressed close to him, and he had to fight back a sob. His friends were loyal, and close, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for them.

Nothing.

Giving up could never be an option.

Lucy-Anne was trying to speak, and Jack could see the pain it caused her. They’d dressed some of her wounds with napkins, and Jack had stopped the worst of the bleeding. But the structural damage to her face was appalling.

“Don’t try to speak,” Jenna said, but Lucy-Anne grabbed at her friend’s jacket and squeezed tight, clenching her fist against the pain.

“Gu…idee…”

“Got an idea?” Jenna asked.

Lucy-Anne nodded.

“I’ll get you a pencil and paper,” Sparky said. “Hold on. Hold on!”

An idea. Jack and Lucy-Anne looked at each other, and he wished he could pluck the idea from her mind. Wished it was that easy.

Sparky returned.

As Lucy-Anne began to write her idea down, Jack was still dwelling on that thought.

Pluck the idea from her mind…

The pain was part of her dream, and in the strange places she wandered, no one knew what she was trying to say. The London of her dreamscape had a bland, washed-out look—all colour was bleached, the sky was a monotone grey, and the parks and avenues were filled with the memories of trees. People walked the streets, but their expressions were neutral. Even when Lucy-Anne tried speaking to them, they only broke into slight frowns. Children walked with parents without being naughty, or inquisitive, or children at all. The River Thames did not flow.

The only splash of colour and life was the woman she was following along the South Bank. Nomad! she tried shouting, but the woman did not seem to hear. Either that or Lucy- Anne’s voice was not working, because she could not hear herself.

I was shot. I can see, but not smell or taste. I can feel and wish I couldn’t. Some of this is true.

So she ran after Nomad instead, sprinting through her dream of a London that never was, and each footfall jarred up through her body and reminded her of the pain.

Nomad turned, smiled, and Lucy-Anne imagined them meeting and embracing and the bomb not