Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
JETT
“Eddie? Are you there?” Jett all but screamed the question into his headset, overwrought as he was with emotion, with pain.
Blood oozed out of a wound across his chest, where fingers had clawed at him, ripping and tearing, reaching to crack bones and still his soft organs.
But Jack had saved him from that fate, and now Jack was dying in his arms.
“You fucking bastard,” Jett said as he wiped more blood off of Jack’s torso. It wasn’t doing anything. Jack’s guts were hanging out, covered by a scrap of shirt while they waited for him to breathe his last.
“I couldn’t face Eddie if I lived and you didn’t,” he said between heaving breaths. “You two need each other more than you need me.”
Tears poured down Jett’s face as he watched his best and closest friend creep closer and closer to final rest. Minutes stretched as Jack bled out, his torso cradled in Jett’s lap.
“I-I didn’t mean this,” Jack started again before stopping to take several shallower breaths.
“This wasn’t supposed…to be the end.” Blood oozed out of him, covered both of them in slick heat, soaking through Jett’s clothing to cool on his skin.
He was going to feel this sensation the rest of his life, another layer of bloodstains that caked his body and soul.
“I know,” Jett responded. “I know you didn’t.” He grabbed the man’s hand as Jack’s breathing started to slow, as the blood flow lessened. “You were gonna go to Enyo and be the fun uncle working Station Security, and live out your fucking golden years doing whatever.”
Jack smiled. Blood stained his face, his lips, his teeth. His eyes had started glazing over. “Yeah…I was.” He coughed once, thin liquid dripped from the corner of his mouth. “Tell the gang I’ll be waiting for ya when it’s time.”
Jack’s eyes closed and the hand that had gripped Jett’s went limp, slipped out of his fingers.
Jack was gone.
Jett screamed his frustrations into the empty city.
To the buildings that loomed over him. He screamed again and again, wordless and feral, tears pouring down his face, until his voice went hoarse.
He cried a little longer, until there was nothing left but cold fury and a burning need to end this.
Whoever had started this horror was going to pay for Jack.
For the hundreds of thousands of others who died, whose names were being compiled into lists to be sent out with standard corporate bullshit in an attempt to appease those who lived on without them. But it wouldn’t work.
Jack was gone and Jett was alone with a monumental task before him. But he would see it through until the end. He would give the dead their vengeance.
Jett waited a while longer, just in case Jack wasn’t really gone yet.
Then he checked for a pulse and found nothing.
“Fucker,” he said as he slipped out from under Jack’s weight, heavier now in death than in life.
“I’ll tell your brother that you didn’t die a worthless death.
” He placed his hand on Jack’s forehead.
“Bye, Jack.” Jett thought he should say something else, but words weren’t what he was good at. He was a man of action, like he’d told Jack months ago. And he would make good on that.
He stood and clutched at his chest, flinched at the ache in his still-healing wound from the Golden Lion.
The Affected had fucked him up before Jack had stepped in.
There was one last stim in his pocket, but he wasn’t going to use it until he got to District 3.
There was no telling what he’d find there.
Not far away was the corpse of the Affected that killed Jack. It was a Terran woman, her long dirty hair covered in blood, her neck shredded and oozing.
Jett was steady on his feet as he crossed the distance between them and kicked her head. Something cracked beneath the weight and pressure of his boot, her head laid at an unnatural angle on her neck.
He kicked again, and again, and again.
Jett kicked out the last of his pent up anger and fear and loss. He kicked until he cracked through her skull and scattered her brains on the pavement beside them.
“Fuck you!” he screamed at the woman, at the ruin of her head, at the scattered grey matter that covered his boot.
Jett wiped the toe of his boot off on the woman’s clothing, turned, and left without looking back.
Jett collapsed against the quarantine barrier between Districts 2 and 3. “Eddie? Are you there?”
There was no answer.
There hadn’t been an answer the last five times he’d pinged the Bridge. His tab claimed it was connected, but still he got no answer, not even the ambient sounds of the Bridge around Eddie. Whatever happened now, Jett was alone.
You are well and truly fucking alone.
“Fuck,” he whispered and curled up to rest his head on his knees. He tried to steady his breathing while he pulled out the last stim. Tried to slow his heartbeat as he jammed the needle against his thigh and felt the medicine and adrenaline enter his body.
There was a rush and mild convulsions, but he waited them out. Jett just focused on the Song, on the way glass shattered, and the steady thump slowed ominously with the beat of his heart.
It had taken longer than Jett liked to reach the wall from where Jack died. He’d avoided every group of Affected, not wanting to waste the stim until he made it here. The silence, the lack of contact with anyone unnerved him more than anything else.
“Eddie?” he all but begged into comms. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer, but he wanted something. Anything to prove that he wasn’t alone, that he wouldn’t die here on the Neo-Tokyo with Jack and Captain Augustus.
He ripped the head set off and threw it. He didn’t need it where he was going, he just needed to be in as good a physical shape as possible. He needed his mind clear, his reflexes sharp. He needed to be a soldier, a shadow, stalking the one who had turned his home into hell.
Slowly the drugs did their job. The adrenaline pushed the tiredness from his mind and body. The wound on his chest stopped bleeding, the ache in his side lessened. Jett slowly unclenched, stood, and stretched.
The fear, the uncertainty, the pain of Jack’s death and the loss of contact with Eddie were dull now.
Everything sat below the smoldering anger and the thrum of adrenaline, the need to do something.
He adjusted his knife in its sheath and changed out the battery in his pistol.
He’d forgotten to get his rifle and now only had these two, his primary weapons.
You don’t need anything else, he told himself with a bitter smile.
Jett walked through an open gate in the barrier between Districts 2 and 3. It was dark on this side, the lights of D2 blocked out by the five-meter-high wall behind him. In the distance he saw a line of Affected.
“What the fuck are you guys up to now?” he asked under his breath. Without the emotions clouding his thoughts, Jett was curious.
This was new behavior.
Jett approached, his boots soft on the concrete below him, his reflexes on high alert.
Without the headset, he didn’t have to worry about being distracted from everything around him.
He was ready when a group of Affected ran at him.
He felt them in the street below him, heard their feet on the ground.
They came at him out of an alley on his left.
Jett pulled out his knife, clicking the plasma on and waited while the lead, a Centaurian, approached. Behind him two Terrans hobbled on broken legs and ankles, still fast and dangerous, but more predictable.
The Centaurian clipped the wall. A gargling sound filled the air as it spun and launched itself at Jett.
Jett was faster than it, faster than most people. He ducked and twisted away from the Affected. It ran several more meters, skidded to a halt, and turned as the second got tangled in the larger one’s limbs. They toppled over each other, regained their feet and ran toward Jett.
The adrenaline pumped through his veins, but Jett was calm, his mind clear.
The hum and glow of his blade was a comfort in Jett’s hand.
He waited until they were within range, then swung.
The knife sliced into the chest of the Centaurian, going up at an angle.
Skin and hair burned in the plasma edge, the wound cauterizing before any fluids could spill out of it.
Jett danced out of the way as the Affected collapsed, twitching.
The plasma edge of his knife sparkled. A burst of brilliant light lit stars behind his natural eye. Then it went out.
Jett clicked the button once more. It fizzled, then reignited.
“Fuck,” Jett hissed as he sheathed the knife and threw himself out of the way of the second and third attacker.
Pain flared in his side as he hit the ground and rolled away, pulling his pistol from its holster as he did.
The safety was off before he landed in a kneeling position and turned to fire at both Affected.
The first went down to his second shot and the other raked fingers across his arm, plowed him over before running into a wall.
Jett had enough time to flip onto his stomach and fire two shots before it regained whatever sense it still had.
It collapsed against the wall, fluids splattering the smooth metal.
Jett pulled himself to his knees and rested. Breaths came heavy and ragged as he sat back on his ankles, palms pressed into his knees.
Behind him, the line of Affected had grown longer. He watched as they trundled forward like a line at food stand, waiting their turn for whatever was at the end. Others walked over, joined the queue. None ever left the line.
Jett skirted them, following outside of their reaching hands.
But smaller tableaus than the one around Augustus dotted the District, making it hard for Jett to keep his distance.
The first was just two legs propped against the side of a building with a head placed between the feet.
The eyes were lidless and staring, the mouth open but covered in a thin, bloody sheet of translucent skin.
The next was four arms, the hands gripping the wrist of the one next to it in a grotesque display of camaraderie.
They grew larger and more complex. One was a whole human body ripped apart at each major joint and laid out with loving attention to detail.
Then whole Affected joined the scenes, holding body parts up at strange, distorted angles.
Jett swallowed down the bile that threatened to choke him every time he passed one.
All the while, Jett followed the line, watched as they occasionally stumbled forward. It meandered through the streets, turning without warning, weaving through benches and parkland until it disappeared down a narrow alley.
There was a strange quality to the air here, deep in District 3: a sparkling like carbonation mixed with the feeling of eyes on your back in the dark and the weight of the endless expanse of the Void outside.
Jett could almost see pinpoints of light flash and die in the air around him, stars burning for a single second and dying as nova.
Jett sucked a breath in through his teeth, hissed it back out.
The tang of death coated his tongue, all copper and sticky sweetness.
Somewhere ahead, where the Affected slowly crept forward, a dark mass waited.
Jett didn’t know what it was, how he could feel it, but it was there.
It was nothing and everything all at once.
“You’re nearby, fucker. I can feel you.”
Jett sidled across the wall, keeping himself out of reach from any Affected who might be more interested in him than whatever called them. At the end of the alley, where the two metal walls curved out, Jett stepped out and faced a mountain of corpses.