Nil Desperandum

8

I couldn’t tell you where I went, or for how long. I must have hit my head. The next thing I knew, or that I remember now, has to do with a dawn. It was really obnoxiously poetic, with pale pink tendrils creeping across the horizon in a magnificent sprawl, intersecting with the vivid indigo of the night sky, against which the stars showed up like diamonds in a very, very big, blue chimney sweep’s ear. It was beautiful, and despite the bone-deep ache in my limbs and the fact that the inside of my skull felt like there was a very irate little drummer using his whole kit to get back at his parents for grounding him, I felt…really peaceful. Too peaceful. The kind of peaceful you feel when you really don’t have anything to worry about anymore. Like breathing.

I remembered, then, that the thing before this had been fighting a bunch of big, ugly robot men, praying that Scott would hurry the fuck up. And Logan. Oh my God. I’d left Logan! I scrambled to my feet and looked wildly round. I felt my heart shudder to a stop. Oh God, indeed.

There it was, out on the empty plain, silhouetted obscenely against the beautiful sunrise. That couldn’t be real. I started out walking, and as the blood began to circulate more freely, I ran, pounding out toward the lone figure nailed to the giant X.

It was further away than it looked. Things always are, in big empty spaces. It took me nearly three minutes before I reached the cross, and somehow, I had already known. It couldn’t have been anyone or anything else.

It was Logan. His body hung limply, stripped to the waist, head lolling forward, but he was still alive. The pulsing beat of his heart still fluttered, if a little shallowly. The cavern of his chest still rose and fell, even if it was in sharp gasps, and the carnage that was his abdomen…well…it would heal, even if his intestines were hanging out. I stood paralysed and catching my breath, mind racing. How do you go about getting a two hundred pound man down from a cross?

It was going to be horrible, and difficult, and probably unthinkable to anyone else, but I knew, already, what had to be done. I took a deep breath, and began to climb.

The mineral reek of his blood and stomach acids were what hit me first, as I scrambled up his body, trying not to think of what I was using as hand-hold. I gagged, my eyes watering. No. it was just the smell. It was only the unbelievable level of undiluted gross. It wasn’t because a man was dying in front of me, literally in my arms, not that I was climbing up what might soon be his corpse in order to maybe save his life. that wasn’t it. The fact that it was also a man I’d gotten drunk with, laughed with, lusted after—no.

I couldn’t afford to think about that if I was going to get us through this. I gripped his body with my knees, ignoring the way the leather of my uniform slid stickily against him. Vivid red, a little purple in places. Oh. Oh, dear God.

I retched over his shoulder, coughing and spitting and crying as I reached out and pulled hard at his hand. It tore free with a wet sound, and his claws slid out, catching me by surprise, and I screamed. The sound clashed with his strangled roar of outraged pain and anger, and I only just managed to maintain my grip on him and the cross, tightening my legs round him. His hand, claws extended, was wrapped round my neck, the inner curve of his razor sharp claws resting gently against my skin. ‘Logan,’ I whispered, as the pressure on my windpipe increased, ‘Logan, it’s me. It’s Jubilee. I’m trying to help you. Please. Please, let me help you.’

His eyes rolled in and out of focus. His lips trembled, peeling slowly back in a tortured rictus from teeth stained pink with blood. His breath came in short, weak bursts. ’His healing factor must be overloaded,’ I thought, ’trying to deal with the massive trauma and blood loss.’

‘Jubilee…’ his voice was almost incoherent.

‘Hold on, Logan. One more hand. Please. Let go of my neck. We can do this.’ I held his gaze steadily, ignoring the terrified litany of scenarios rabbitting through my mind. ’Ohjesusgod please oh Logan don’t kill me please don’t die.’ The grip round my throat loosened marginally, then fell away, claws retracting. I breathed heavily, sniffling. ’Damn it, Lee, get a grip.’ I tapped his cheek. ‘Stick with me, chief. Come on. The same thing has the happen to your other hand, and I need you to stay with me. Please, Wolvie.’ My hands closed on his forearm. ‘I’m gonna count you down. On two. One,’ I set my teeth, ‘two.’ I pulled hard.

We fell backward. Well, I fell backward, spinning out of control, and I managed to kick free of the bulk of him flying forward, just in time, twisting my ankle as I landed on an unexpected rock. I heard the feral roar before I felt him tear free of the cross, just a yard away, surging to his feet. And then he fell, snarling incoherently.

I forced my eyes open. He was lying on his hands an knees, breathing hard, innards hanging in dripping coils from his abdomen. The muscle was trying to close round them, but he tore at it savagely with his fingers. His head turned sideways, and his suffering eyes caught on mine. He was sucking in deep, hard breaths, making greedy sounds as he inhaled life. ‘So, kid,’ he ground out, his claws sliding out and locking into place with that clean, surgical sound that seemed so terribly out of place on someone as much of an atomic fuckmess as he was, ‘you gonna give a fella a hand or what?’

Five seconds later, I was up to my wrists in his organs, hastily arranging things in the proper way. It took some doing, and he had to cut through himself again where he was beginning to heal, but finally everything was where it should be. My face felt cold and sticky. I’d been crying, and now I began to shake, falling away from his body as it sealed itself (too slowly) back up. My stomach roiled, and I wanted to throw up again, but there was nothing in my stomach. I breathed in air that was still heavy with the smell of his coppery blood, and closed my eyes. Finally, I felt I could talk without bursting into tears.

‘What happened?’

‘The Reavers happened.’ His voice was flat and hard. ‘You disappeared out of the middle of them, and there were too many for me. When I came to, I was pinned up like a Goddamned Christmas ornament. Alone. That’s all I know. That, and we’re fuckin’ far away from Warrawong.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can see for about twenty miles on this scape, and it don’t feature.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yep.’ He was in no shape to walk, really. He healed from the outside inward, and even though the massive holes in him had gone, there was no telling what kind of trauma he was still suffering. ‘I can walk, kid.’ He said, as though reading my mind. ‘It’ll take me forever, but I can do it if you can.’ As an afterthought, he added, ‘Where’d ya go, anyhow?’

‘I don’t know. But I think that Gateway bloke is some kind of teleporter. I think he was trying to save us.’ I stared at the ground. Red dirt. I tried not to wonder whether it was blood. It was still too dark to tell. ‘I would never have left you on purpose.’ Even to my own ears, it sounded like self-justification.

‘Hey.’ He reached across the few feet that separated us, lifted my chin. ‘You’d’a been a goner. They’d’a hung you up beside me, and I don’t think I could’ve handled that kinda weight for the rest of my life. He probably did save you, and I’m glad he did. Cause then you wouldn’t have been around to haul me off that thing.’ He winced in pain as he shifted, struggled to his feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

I fiddled with my belt. ‘Maybe the com-link is still active.’ I punched the buttons. Even without the lack of machine humming, I knew with the assurance of someone with a firm grip of the law of probability as hypothesized by one Mr. Murphy, that it was toast. Logan’s belt was gone. I stood, and held out an arm. ‘Come on. You can lean on me. Let’s head…’ I hesitated. ‘Which direction do you think we should go?’

He paused, and inhaled deeply. ‘This way,’ he said, pointing due southeast. ‘That’s the direction they dragged me from.’

I nodded, looped an arm round his waist.

We made some slow fucking progress, and it didn’t look like he was healing any faster. We walked for what seemed like years, keeping a slow, steady pace, the march of condemned criminals to the noose. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t that melodramatic. There was more grunting and sweating and cursing than fateful foreboding. It wasn’t long before the sun rose, shining full in our faces. It felt like it had risen just for us, and not in order to be kind.

To Logan’s credit, as messed up as he was, I was the one who stumbled the most, in a dehydrated near-faint. I caught myself before I hit the ground most times, but I felt weak. I hadn’t eaten since the few hundred calories worth of crunchy bars in the jet, and I was feeling it. the lack of blood sugar combined with dehydration hit me like a brick wall, and there were times when I just stood and swayed. Distantly, I could hear Logan asking—well, demanding, really—whether I was okay. I nodded. ‘M’cool.’ I sighed, and shook my head to clear it. We couldn’t stop. We had to get to Warrawong, and maybe from there, we could find our way to Alex Summers’ cabin. We kept walking.

I was focusing so hard on putting one foot in front of the other, following him as he sniffed out our trail back, that it was a minute before the strange whirring sound caught my attention. It had been going on for a while, but I hadn’t noticed. ’Way to go,’ I thought, and reached for Logan. My fingers caught on the waistband of his trousers. He turned, a brow lifting. ‘What’s that sound?’ I gasped, my voice cracked. He sniffed, pointed.

‘S’probably that guy.’

About fifteen yards away was a man, sitting cross-legged on the dirt, spinning something at the end of a string. Even from that distance, I could see his watermelon-slice smile. A sound came from deep in my throat that I’ll never produce again without radical surgery, and I veered off toward the figure, sprinting, my lungs and ankle bitching marvellously the whole way. I leapt forward to tackle him when I was close enough, but hey, just my luck, he winked out of existence, and I sprawled headfirst into the sand. A sound like light being split by a musical note, and a moment later, he was there again, about two inches to my left. ‘Who the hell are you?’ I gasped, scrabbling back to my feet. His beatific smile remained.

‘I’m Gateway. I be saving your hide.’ His voice carried a thick Strine accent. ‘Rickie sent me, take you back to old Brugballa Paddock.’

‘Rickie.’ My mind back-pedalled furiously. ‘Rikenna Dusk.’ He nodded. I snarled. ‘Why didn’t you go back for Logan? Why did you leave him with the Reavers?’ his smile disappeared suddenly, and he shook an admonitory finger at me.

‘You one crazy stubborn lady, you are. Kick me, you fallin’ back. I lost you in the Outside Place, scared me but good. I thought you were a goner for dead sure.’

‘How did I get…’ I waved a hand vaguely in Logan’s direction. He was approaching slowly, apparently unconcerned, ‘…to him? And why’d you not go back for him?’

‘Lost my bearings.’ He snapped. ‘You found him yourself.’

‘Found him…myself?’

‘Yep.’ Logan came abreast now, looking unamused. ‘I’m Gateway.’ The aborigine said cheerfully. Logan shook his hand.

‘Okay.’

‘I be takin’ you back to Brugballa Paddock.’

‘Okay.’ I think Logan must have been too tired to protest.

Gateway gave me a look that implied that things would have been much easier if I hadn’t been so difficult, which for some reason I recognised pretty quickly, and held out his hands. Logan took one, and I, after a moment of hesitation, grasped the other.

A sound, like light being split by a musical note.