Chapter 28 On the Other Side of Death, Full Steam Ahead Down the Crazy-Town Line
On the Other Side of Death, Full Steam Ahead Down the Crazy-Town Line
Layla’s eyes were glossed over by her tremendous pain, making the blue-gray of her irises stark beneath their glassiness.
I skidded to her side, dropped to the floor, and clutched her hand with my own, Magnum’s blood still wet in places along my fingers and palms. I kept my gaze fixed on her face and not on how her body was broken in so many places.
“Hang on, girl,” I said around a choked sob. “Bad guy’s dead now, so just hang the fuck on.”
Her lips parted as if to speak. All that emerged was a weak, shuddering exhale that finished shattering my heart into a million fucking pieces.
No inhale followed it.
Desperation rocked me as I squeezed her hand. There would be no response, I already understood that. I’d witnessed death enough times by now to know what it looked like.
How it felt.
I squeezed anyway, calling her name, over and over again, until my voice grew raspy.
At some point I stopped trying. A deep, tremendous silence settled within me.
I was hollow.
Without my friends to love and fight for, I was empty—so, so empty.
Hands eventually descended on my back and shoulders. I didn’t care whose, because I already knew they wouldn’t be Griffin’s or Layla’s or Hunt’s or Brady’s.
This was why Griffin said he’d rather die time and time again than to have to watch the rest of us go. This cavernous hollowness so terrible it would consume me was why he’d been so haunted for being the sole survivor among us after the shooting at Ridgemore High.
As if I too had been speared through, smashed, and shattered, I shuddered at the very real possibility that I might never speak with any of them ever again. I pressed both hands to my chest, smearing my shirt and skin with blood most foul.
Ten thousand Magnums weren’t worth these four.
All I wanted was these four people. Just these four.
“Joss … honey.” It was my dad—or my not-dad, but what did any of that matter anymore?
His familiar hand soothed circles along my back. That was when I discovered I was shaking violently.
“Honey, come on,” he said gently. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Numbly, I rose. My legs wobbled. My dad pulled me into him. Pressed a kiss to my head.
“I need their bodies together,” I said in a voice I heard as if from far, far away.
“What? Honey, no. Leave them. We’ll come back for them soon. We won’t abandon them here, I promise.”
I stepped free of his embrace. Crouched to grab an arm or leg of Layla’s that wouldn’t cause her further damage, decided there were no good options, and turned toward Brady instead.
I clutched his arm and tugged him toward her. His body caught on the wooden fragments of a chair, but I continued dragging him right over them.
“Joss, no …” my dad said.
“What’s she doing?” Orson asked. When my dad didn’t answer, he asked me the same question.
I didn’t so much as glance their way. I was already staring at Hunt, calculating how far away he was and how to get him over here.
“I’m gonna save them,” I said, my thoughts racing ahead. “Help me get Hunt over next to Brady and Layla.”
“Are you thinking of trying to revive them?” my dad asked.
I didn’t answer. Of course that’s what I was going to do.
“Magnum told you doing that would kill you,” he said, as if the drash hadn’t been talking to me directly.
The mob of Magnums had concealed much if my dad had been here long enough to hear that.
“Magnum was a self-serving liar,” I said, straddling Hunt’s hips, examining the huge wound in his abdomen.
My dad crouched beside me. So did Orson. The hushed conversations of the other survivors in the room burbled like lapping waves.
“I don’t think he was lying about this,” my dad said. “From what we’ve gathered, he was telling the truth. If you try to revive them, you’ll fail. And you’ll die.”
When I tried to grip it, my palms slid along the chair leg impaling Hunt. Too much blood. I wiped my hands aggressively on the thighs of my jeans until the blood was tacky enough that I could grab the chair leg and hold on.
“Sweetheart … you can’t,” my dad said. His tone was still gentle but firm, an imploring edge starting to sneak into it.
I adjusted my grip. Now that I had purpose again, my shaking had subsided.
Sucking in an inhale, I yanked the chair leg from Hunt’s stomach.
Its tip splintered and left fragments of wood inside his body, but I didn’t clean them out.
Who knew what might happen if Magnum’s blood from my hands got inside Hunt, melded with his own blood?
Maybe nothing would happen, but I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t.
If I could just get Hunt back alive, his preternatural healing—maybe with the help of a surgeon—would fix him up. I tossed the chair leg aside. It clattered and thudded.
Rounding Hunt’s body, I squatted close and slid my arms under his, hooking them around his shoulders. I prepared to heft his weight on my own, but suddenly Orson was there, lifting his legs.
I glanced up at him. He offered me a grim, hardened smile that was as hopeless as my not-dad’s words.
But when I stood with Hunt’s body, so did he. A pool of blood marked where my friend had fallen. His shirt was soaked, front and back, and dripped as we moved.
We were sidestepping a pile of fallen hardcover books when my dad hustled over and helped me support Hunt’s shoulders.
Gently, as if Hunt’s open eyes weren’t unseeing, we lowered his body to the floor beside Brady. Their legs touched.
Nodding at my progress, I aimed my attention in the direction where I left Griffin and found Armando and Yolanda already carrying his body.
They lowered him next to Layla, Armando cradling Griffin’s busted head with a tenderness that made my heart clench and my eyes water.
His stare stuck on Griffin, Orson said, “Joss, your dad’s right. As much as I’d like you to bring my son back to life … you shouldn’t try. The five of you loved each other like I’ve never seen anybody else love each other. They loved you.”
With filthy hands, he rubbed his eyes. His face was so bare without his usual tortoiseshell glasses. “They wouldn’t want you to get yourself killed, too, trying to save them when they’re”—his inhale shook—“when they’re dead already.”
My dad’s hand was back on my shoulder. “There’s no saving them, honey. The best you can do now is to save yourself. Live for them. Make it count.”
“Griffin would want that,” Orson said. “How he loved you …”
Each time they used the past tense was like a shovelful of dirt over their coffins, deep in a hole in the ground already.
I looked at my dad and Orson. Grief sagged across their features, making them appear a decade older.
So they hadn’t lied … They did love us in their twisted ways.
I gazed from them to the two remaining ninja instructors, then to others whose faces were new, whose names I didn’t know.
The formidable wolf was gone. In his place stood a naked, blood-soaked man who appeared to be in his midtwenties. His stance was strong. He wasn’t defeated.
He nodded at me. A recognition that risks should be taken when the stakes were important enough. Either that, or it was what I wanted to see. It didn’t really matter, regardless.
Armando, in his melodic Brazilian lilt, caught my attention. “Me perdoa. Sorry we not fight for you before. It was right thing to do.”
“I’m sorry too,” I said, the words still sounding foreign, like I was there in my body but also not. Like a part of me was missing.
“Sweetheart,” my dad said, rolling on the balls of his feet, his hands clenched into fists, searching for a way to stop me when he had to know there was nothing he could do. “Please. Don’t do this. You’ll only die with them.” Panic made his plea jumpy.
I had nothing to say to him or to anyone else. No final grandiose speech about the life-changing nature of love and friendship and loyalty, or about the nobility of sacrifice.
The only people I wanted to share anything with were on the other side of death.
I was going to cross that line to retrieve them. If I didn’t succeed? If I didn’t return? Well then, soon enough I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
Bobo rubbed along my legs. Several smears of blood on my jeans were thick and goopy enough not to be fully dry yet, and they dragged across his dark fur. Not that it mattered. His muzzle was coated in the stuff, as were his front paws, like he’d used them to clamp down on the heart.
I asked him privately.
Who was I to judge? I’d been the one to dig out the man’s pumping heart with my bare hands.
Bobo’s tail was pointed.
Knowing it was the last I might ever give him, I made myself smile at him.
Bobo jerked his head up and down, his ears flopping. he repeated.
“Joss, no, please,” my dad said while I stepped over my friends’ bodies and lowered myself into the center of them.
I draped a leg over Griffin and another over Layla. I rested a hand on Hunt and the other on Brady. I made sure my bare skin touched theirs. Then I closed my eyes.
My dad began shouting. Orson soon joined in with quieter pleas that were just as insistent.
Man, had my life ever jumped tracks and railroaded down the Crazy-Town line.
Full steam ahead.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d done it the previous times. I didn’t know how to do it this time. So I did what had worked for me before: I got the fuck out of my own way and let that knowledge which transcended this form roll through me.
The floor gave a final rumble beneath my seat—was the battle not over everywhere, then? At least I heard no more gunfire.
I sank into myself, feeling where my skin connected with my friends. I reminded myself I wasn’t just a human, I was also a lushina. What they could do, I could do. I was the one responsible for my crew’s immortality. All I had to do was renew the spark of that everlasting life within them.
Give them a jump start.
Searching for that electric lightning juice cycling within my system, I found it crackling already, a part of me now.
My dad yelled some more. Other voices did too.
Then they faded.
Power, like an electric storm, crackled and arced and sizzled up and down my insides, jumping outward to coat my skin, making me untouchable by mere mortals.
I traveled back to my mindspace, relieved not to find any lingering remnants of Magnum within. I felt for my friends’ energies, for their own mindspaces, and when I found them, all at once, I dreamwalked into them.
Then, like a defibrillator in the flesh, I pulsed my power into them.
I demanded—not through our telepathic link, which felt dead too, but of their very essences.
The power of lightning and the lushina surged through me in long pulses.
In the same instant, the four of them responded.
Their energies came back online.
They turned on.
I imagined their essences as heartbeats, and, slowly at first, they began thumping.
Ba-dum.
Next, they sped up.
Badum. Badum. Badum. Badum. Badum.
Something bulldozed into my body.
Bobo.
Unable even to catch myself, I crashed backward onto my friends.
At some point, I left behind the physical for the dream—for another world, another dimension, whatever it was.
Bobo seemed to be barking or talking, others to be shouting.
It all slipped from my grasp, beyond my reach.
The dream claimed me entirely.
My own heart stopped.
The vessel that was my body unfurled like a blooming flower, releasing my essence.
The lightning storm that had raged within me calmed.
My soul floated free toward its source—the same for humans, lushina, and drash.