Jenna had parked close to the front of an old discount furniture store, and carrying Jack between them they'd entered and moved quickly through to the back entrance. Lucy-Anne had pulled aside a pile of damp, rotting mattresses to reveal a fire escape, and she'd opened it with a kick. Sparky had then slung Jack over his shoulder and followed Lucy-Anne outside, passing across a small courtyard and along a narrow alley before emerging onto the next street. There, an abandoned Starbucks had become their hiding place. If those things had been pursuing them, they hoped that they'd now shaken them off. But if they did still follow, there was little they could do.
None of them would leave Jack behind, and Lucy-Anne was shocked at how vulnerable she now felt. Without realising it she'd quickly come to rely on Jack to protect them all.
“See if you can find any water,” Jenna told Rhali. “Lucy-Anne, tissues or napkins, anything clean to mop away the blood.”
“Me?” Sparky asked.
“Best keep watch,” she said. Lucy-Anne caught the glance between her two friends; they knew how defenceless they all were now.
She climbed behind the counter and looked for napkins. The place had been ransacked at some point, but a drift of napkins remained on one of the lower shelves. Rhali found some bottled water, and Jenna went about cleaning Jack's wounds.
“I think it looks worse than it is,” Jenna said.
“You shitting me?” Lucy-Anne said. “His eye's out, Jenna!”
“No. Eyelid's slashed, and that makes it look like his eyeball's damaged. But I don't think it is.” She mopped blood, and Jack's eyes rolled.
There were other cuts all across the right side of his face, from his jaw up into his hairline. Jenna cleaned them with bottled water, but that thing that had attacked him, its horrid pincers…Lucy-Anne didn't like to wonder what germs it carried. She watched Jenna dab at the cuts, and then examine the deep bruise already forming across Jack's temple and into his hairline.
“That?” Lucy-Anne asked.
“Fractured skull,” Hayden said. In a flurry of movement Sparky was up and at him, a seventeen-year-old boy pushing this thirty-year-old man back against the wall, forearm pressing against his throat, other hand fisted and drawn back ready to punch.
Hayden looked terrified.
“You haven't earned the right to say a single word about my friend,” Sparky said. He released Hayden as quickly as he'd pushed him, turning back to Jack and squatting beside him. He leaned in close and examined the wounds that Jenna was tending. “So is it fractured?”
“I don't know,” Jenna said. “I…I don't really know what I'm doing, Sparky. I can dab the blood away. Given the right kit I might even be able to patch his eye and bandage him up. But…”
She cleaned gently, lovingly. Jack shuddered.
“Come on, mate,” Sparky said. He held Jack's hand and squeezed, moving his arm up and down, slowly so as not to shift him too suddenly.
“He's just knocked out,” Rhali said. “That's all. The thing banged his head.”
“It's really hard to be knocked out,” Sparky said. “Not like in the movies. You have to do damage to knock someone out.”
Oh no, oh no, Lucy-Anne thought. She had to lean against a table to prevent herself from slumping to the floor, biting her lip and drawing blood. She briefly considered letting herself drop into dreamland, dreaming Jack well again. But it might never last. And her wider fears included not only Jack.
She looked around at the others. Sparky and Jenna at least were thinking the same thing. They'd only known each other for two years, but they'd been through a lot, and she thought they were brothers and sisters. Family. The only family she had left, and she could not bear to mourn any more.
“We're wasting time,” Lucy-Anne said. “You know that, don't you?”
None of them answered. Rhali looked up at her, about to speak, but she bit back the words. Hayden shuffled his feet. Jenna paused in her cleaning of Jack's wounds.
“We can't just leave him here.”
“I'll stay,” Rhali said.
“And it wasn't Nomad's to give either,” Jack said, and they all held their breaths, ready for him to open his eyes. But he remained unconscious, shuddering occasionally. His skin was growing pale.
“Right,” Sparky said. He stroked Jack's hand, eyes turning left and right as he thought something through. “Right. How long?”
“About five hours,” Hayden said softly.
“Long enough,” Sparky said. “You said you needed an hour.”