When someone pulls me away from Xave’s still body, I’m done being strong.
All the reasons are gone and, in their place, I see only ghostly shapes of the things that used to matter; the things that made fighting worth it.
“Marci,” someone says. Hands slide under my arms and separate me from Xave.
Aydan. Horrible, despicable Aydan who makes my head buzz like one of the monsters.
No. I don’t want to move. I want to stay with my head on his chest, because at any second his voice will rumble, his heart will beat. I have to stay, stay, stay. Every part of me fights to remain, except my body, my defeated limbs. I try, but barely manage to lift a hand.
“No, Xave.” James kneels next to him, index and middle fingers against his neck, desperately looking for a pulse. “Damn it.” There’s a growl deep in his chest.
Blare stands behind him, eyes dark and in a trancelike stare that anchors her to Xave’s slackened features.
I was supposed to save him if he needed it, and I failed him. My head falls to the side, slumps against Aydan’s chest.
Steps. Someone running.
“C’mon, c’mon, let’s get outta here.” Rheema runs past, too pumped on adrenaline to notice anything except the two guns she’s using to fire backward, over her shoulder, and forward, opening a path toward the exit.
James curses, gets to his feet. “Go! I’ll cover. GO!”
The command is fierce and snaps Aydan and Blare into action.
“Marci, we have to go,” Aydan says.
My eyes lift to his with disinterest. There’s something like shame on his face. He knows what he’s asking for is cruel beyond measure. I can’t leave. I have to stay with Xave. He can’t stay here all alone, growing cold, no one to guard him from the trampling beasts in this godforsaken place.
“Help yourself!” Blare urges me, not unkindly.
“Please, Marci. Get up. Help me,” Aydan says.
His arms struggle with mine and, limp as they are, I’m impossible to wrangle. My dead weight is more than he can handle. I don’t even need to fight him.
Shots. I think it must be James, trying to buy time, prolonging the inevitable. He thinks we can defeat this evil, but we stand no chance. We are outnumbered and weak. Eklyptors have sneaked up on us, have corroded our world right under our noses and we’re no match for them. Not even close. Humanity holds no aces up its sleeve. Just like others didn’t stand a chance against us and met oblivion at our hands. The irony will be sweet and Mother Nature, the gods, and whoever else, will laugh and laugh, and we will deserve it.
“Damn it,” a curse from Blare as she helps Aydan sling me over his shoulder.
The world is upside down as I dangle at Aydan’s back, unsure of how I got there. And for a moment, it doesn’t matter, until Aydan begins to walk and we move away from Xave.
“Put me down,” I order.
Whether or not he hears me above the shots and animalistic growls that break behind us, Aydan tightens his grip on my legs and begins to run. My head bounces up and down. I make my hands into fists and beat on the back of his black jeans, wriggling and hating him more than I’ve ever hated anyone. I had thought him weak, but he doesn’t relent, barely even wavers. Shimmering bits of glass twinkle from the floor. The smell of spilled alcohol drills a path into my sinuses.
“Don’t! Let me go, you bastard. I have to stay with him. Don’t you see?” My throat strains with the shouts, feeling as though it might tear open and bleed all over Aydan.
A cool breeze hits my wet face as we step outside.
“He’s alone. He needs me.” Tears run out the corners of my eyes, onto my forehead and into my hair; then I confess the truth, the knowledge that is tearing me apart molecule by molecule, atom by atom. “Please, I—I need him.”
My voice dies, drowned in a fit of coughs brought on by my exploding words and the sheer force of my anguish. With my voice so leaves my will to fight him. I fall limp again and just dangle, useless and beaten, wrung empty by sorrow and something else that grows and grows at a prodigious rate.
Guilt.
Guilt because I turned away from Xave, because some unknown force in me chose to turn away and save Rheema. Guilt because if I wasn’t the freak I am, I would have never abandoned him to perform mind tricks; I would have taken him to safety, to … to his brother who’s suddenly here, helping Aydan push me into the back of a van.
“Shit. What the hell is she doing here?” Clark asks, hoisting me onto a seat. “Where are you hurt? Fuck, so much blood.” His eyes, so much like his brother’s, sweep the length of my body. He wipes my face, and he doesn’t know. Oh God, he doesn’t know the blood isn’t mine.
Blare and Aydan pile into the van, too.
“Where are James and Xave?” Oso asks from the driver’s seat. His kind, brown eyes peer into the van’s dark rear.
Blare exchanges a quick glance with Aydan. Clark doesn’t miss it.
“They’re coming, right?” He looks outside through the open sliding door, his body leaning forward as if he’s about to take off running into the club. No one answers. He steps out of the van and onto the sidewalk. “They’re coming, right?!” he asks again, this time in an angry shout.
The hum of electric streetlamps and traffic fill the silence. Clark’s chest pumps and pumps. I absently stare at the back of his neck, foreseeing his pain and the huge crack that will tear him in two never to be put back together again.
Suddenly, he whirls. “Is somebody going to fucking answer?” he screams, then shudders with the force of a fear that twists his face into a terrible grimace. He looks from Blare to Aydan to me. “Marci?!”
I jump at the thundering sound of my name. His eyes search my face then lock with mine, looking for the answer my lips won’t give him. But there’s nothing in my gaze. Nothing. I know because I feel it. A great emptiness, a void, a depthless expanse like a black hole.
Clark shakes his head, understanding inching its way into the beginning fissures of the crack that will be his undoing. Except, he doesn’t let it grow and tapes it over with denial. “No!”
A determined expression shapes his face and he begins to turn. He’s going inside because that would be a lesser madness than standing here, splitting in two.
“Don’t!” Aydan exclaims, understanding Clark’s intention all-to-well.
But Clark never gets to turn all the way toward the nightclub, because the madness comes to him instead, breezing into the van in James’s arms, then landing on the floorboards in the shape of his brother’s lifeless body.
“Go, go, go!” James’s voice, hoarse and desperate.
A volley of shots rings in the night. The engine revs as Oso steps on the gas. One of the mandrill-like creatures bursts out of the nightclub into the street and bounds toward the van like some sort of projectile. James snatches Clark by the collar, pulls him inside and slides the cargo door shut. There’s a deafening thud followed by an inhuman shriek. The van rocks slightly with the impact. Outside, tires screech against the blacktop while, in here, Clark begs his little brother to please wake up, but Xave will not talk to us again. He’s still and I try to pretend he’s asleep, but it doesn’t work. His handsome face holds a pained expression that makes it impossible. I long to see his expressive hazel eyes, but they are forever empty now. I want to clean the blood that stains his fingers, but what good will it do?
In my peripheral vision, the shapes that make up my world run downward like wax, like rain, like so much blood.
Shadows.
Then I realize that outside has become far worse than inside has ever been.
So I shut my eyes and let them take me.