CHAPTER 63 - JACK

Before him, Wukong stands triumphant, drunk on the power granted to him by the scavenged weapon of a blind god. Under his boot, with his spear at the tip of her throat, is the wounded lioness, her great paws still. Both of them are staring at him, waiting, anticipating.

He finds the revolver at his hip and pulls it free, feels his hands go through the motions—pop the cylinder, case the load, slam it home and disregard the safety. For a moment, his awareness peaks beyond the haze of memory.

Then, between footfalls, he’s subsumed again—

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The thing about getting stabbed, Jack reflected, was that the stitches hurt more than the actual knife. He hadn’t even realized what had happened, not even after he’d got his gun under the target’s jaw and put his teeth through the top of his head. It was Elias who had realized it, and Elias who had stitched him up because Elias had that way of looking out for him.

“How’re you doing, man?” Elias asked.

The wound throbbed beneath his shirt, and it took every ounce of Jack’s will to resist brushing his fingers over it, to make sure the stitches were still holding. It was one hell of a twentieth birthday present, but, really, keeping his teeth and life intact were better ones.

“Yeah,” Jack replied, and he wasn’t sure of what else to say. He wouldn’t be walking if he wasn’t doing fine. It was okay he didn’t say much. Elias did the talking for the both of them.

The comfortable silence persisted as they walked up the driveway to the town hall-turned-palace. Ahead of them, silhouettes wandered and danced amid the light and sound. When they reached the door, a pair of guards in stolen riot gear patted them down, and then they were among the crowds.

Australia had weathered the Collapse better than most. That was what the people in charge said, at least. It hadn’t seemed that way when he’d been growing up. Even now, it was only really valid in the urban centers. Outside of that, when you hit the rural towns, it’d been a capricious hurricane, annihilating conventional law and order and replacing it with a strange facsimile.

Here, the facsimile came from a regenerating bombast who went by Starfish. And he maintained just enough order that the authorities were content to leave his crimes, and his fiefdom, to the last pages of their ledger.

Elias was in good with Starfish. He was in good with everyone. Jack wasn’t.

“I’m going to go find the boss and talk business,” Elias said, slapping him on the back. “Won’t be too long. Soak up the atmosphere and we’ll bounce out of here ASAP. I know how you get around crowds.”

“Sure,” Jack said. “Take as long as you need. Maybe get something extra for the whole got-stabbed thing.”

Elias laughed. “Hey, of course,” he replied, smiling. “What kinda friend would I be if I didn’t?”

Then he was gone, and Jack was alone. The crowd moved around him and Jack watched them in the way Elias had been teaching him, to try and figure out who was a mark and who was a threat, and who was assessing him the same way. In Starfish’s domain, there was no shortage of all three.

Then, a fourth.

She pushed through the crowd with ease, green eyes alight with recognition. Her amber hair fell lazily around her shoulders, but didn’t quite hide the ragged scar that drew a path that linked chin, jaw and temple and left her smile crooked.

It was still the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.

“Lachesis?”

“The one and only!”

He hugged her before he even realized he was doing it. She lingered in his arms in a way no one else ever did.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you were getting out of all this!”

“I am,” she said, stepping back. “I’m actually here to square things up, say all my goodbyes, before I go west. And I thought you were doing the same thing, mister, or was that a lie three months ago?”

It was a hard question to answer, but not because he had lied. Had it really been three months?

“Yeah,” Jack replied. “That was the plan.” And then, then the hard part: “But Elias...”

Lachesis’ expression darkened. “Still following him around, huh?”

Something about the question felt like a jab to the nose. “He’s my friend.” And his answer felt like a weak deflection.

“Let’s not talk about him, okay? I shouldn’t have said anything.” She canted her head towards the stairs that led up to a mezzanine decking that overlooked the dog pits. “Let’s hang for a bit. Unless you want to stay here and practice your brooding routine?”

For some reason, he didn’t.

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The mezzanine was empty. Not a surprise, given that Mastiff’s monstrous hounds were asleep because their master’s boss was having a party and not a purge.

Jack settled against the railing, and Lachesis settled against him. Slowly, carefully, like he was afraid he’d break her, or she’d break him, he set his hand on the small of her back. This was part of their routine, somehow both familiar and alien, a dance where he always felt like he was a few seconds out of step.

“Have you been okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, automatically. “Well, I got stabbed.” He added and pointed to his side, still throbbing. “Still stings. But I’m okay.”

“Jesus, Jack. Was this one of Elias’ ideas?”

Admitting it seemed like a bad idea, but both of them knew the answer. “Yeah,” Jack said. “It was a job for Starfish. One of his guys had been feeding info to Taipan’s group, and he came at us.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“You shot him?”

“Yeah. It was him or me.”

“You said he came at us. Where was Elias?”

Jack frowned. He didn’t actually know. “Busy. Watching the back exit, I think.”

“You could have died, Jack,” Latch said, “Are you okay?”

“I was shaking for a bit, but it stopped.”

Lachesis nodded and, for a time, didn’t say anything. She knew how life worked. For a while, it’d been six of them against the world, but only Lachesis and Elias had mattered.

“So, listen,” she began. “This actually gives me a good hook. Do you want to come with me?”

“What?”

“Do you want to come with me, Jack?”

What was she saying?

“What do you mean?" he asked, "Where?”

“Somewhere better than this. I’m done with this. Latchkey Lachesis is dead. I’ve got my scars from it. I’m not going to stick around to be caught in the crossfire of the next empowered grudge match.”

“You mean caught in that crossfire again.” He knew what he should do. He should just reach out and touch that scar, and yet...

“I always forget how funny you are,” Lachesis replied, voice arch. “But seriously, I do mean it. Neither of us have a record, Jack. We’re just hatchetmen—sorry, hatchetpeople. We should walk away while we still can.”

“You think we can just leave?”

“Sure. We haven’t handled any money. We don’t know who any of the higher-ups are behind their masks. We don’t know anything that makes us a risk. We’re just pretty little thugs. No one’ll notice us when we’re gone.”

But they hadn’t always been. Before everything ended, before the hurricane had hit and thrown them all into the streets, they had just been kids. Not normal—Jack knew he never qualified for that, even if he didn’t know why. There was always a gap between him and the others, but a gap that let him to know that he was the odd one out.

“What if,” Jack began, “We could be more than thugs? We could be heroes—legends.”

Lachesis sighed and looked out toward the horizon. He felt it through the shift of her spine. “Is this another one of his ideas?”

“Mine, actually. Elias knows people. With the right jobs, we’d have the money to—”

“Jack, you’ve been working this for as long as I have. In all these years, how much money have you seen?”

“Not enough,” he said, sighing. “Barely enough.”

“That’s because we’re disposable. And not everyone’s lucky enough to walk away from getting stabbed out here. It’s not worth it. We never wanted to stay here. Maybe one of us does, but not you. You’re just sort of... comfortable with it.”

I’m comfortable here, too, he wanted to say, but the words didn’t quite make it.

“I guess.”

“You’re smarter than this. You just have this habit of getting really stupid whenever Elias is involved.”

Pinpricks flared across the back of his neck. “If it weren’t for him, we’d both be dead.”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging into him. “But just because he saved your life, it doesn’t mean you need to be indebted to him forever.”

Jack couldn’t find an argument against that. So, he turned his eyes to the horizon, as if he could see whatever she could. “You’re really serious?”

“Sure. I’ve got a car and money and some distant family out west. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s got to be better than this, right?”

“What if it’s not?”

“Jack, at the very least, you won’t be getting stabbed.”

Or fed to the hounds, he thought.

“Yeah, point taken.”

“So, we could get back on our feet. Be normal again. See each other more than every couple of months.”

Those words catalyzed anxious tension into pure terror. Normal? He had never been normal. The world existed behind panes of glass and, if she looked past them, she’d realize there was nothing in him, nothing that she actually wanted to figure out. Only emptiness and distance and a lack of want, and she would take it badly as people always did—mistaking a constant feeling for one directed purely at her.

It couldn’t work. He recoiled without wanting to, unable to breathe, unable to think. Lachesis stayed precisely where she was, watching him as if she was waiting for him to see something or say something or do something.

But he was blind, mute and crippled, and nothing she wanted made sense. It couldn’t work, and it’d burn down whatever little good he had in the world.

Or maybe it could work, and that was what scared him.

He didn’t want to stay, but he didn’t want to go. And everything took the path of least resistance, especially in a crisis, which meant staying was the easiest route. So, there he was, stuck. Floundering for the words to match how he felt.

Footsteps behind them. Elias’ gait.

“Jack,” he said, at the top of the stairs. “It’s time to— Oh. Hey, Latch.”

Lachesis slid away, and her absence was an ache that was more real than the lingering pain in his stitches.

“Hey,” she replied, voice flat.

“I didn’t know you were up here. Look, I didn’t mean to interrupt anything. I can come back later.”

“No. You didn’t interrupt anything. You’ve done more than enough already, I think.” She moved toward the staircase, shaking her head. Jack watched her go, sick with a horrible, hateful sense of relief.

She hesitated by the steps, hanging on the other side of the threshold.

“Jack,” she said. “One day, I hope you see what he’s doing to you. Goodbye.”

And then she was gone, and Elias was approaching.

“I’m sorry, man.”

“It’s fine,” Jack lied.

“I know you and her—”

“I said, it’s fine.”

Elias nodded. For a time, silence.

“So, things didn’t go so well with Starfish,” he said. “Turns out, the boss wanted him alive. What, so he can just feed him to the dogs and make some big speech?” Elias rolled his eyes. “Fucking capes, right? But we got paid.”

“Great.”

Elias was quiet again, watching him.

“Hey, do you remember what you said?” he began. “About doing things to make the world a better place? Well, I think I know an idea how we can make that happen—”

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Monkey is still watching him with the face of an excited father. Because here he is, the prodigal son, ready to sacrifice the lioness and admit he was wrong.

His aim wavers with his gaze. From the lioness, fallen beneath Monkey, then back to him. The choice is as obvious and stark as the one six years ago, but he has the knowledge to understand this one, a toolset to work with it, and the perspective to see it for what it is.

He keeps his gaze on Sabra. Monkey’s revolver settles to draw a line that’d put a shell in the gap between helmet and chest. There’s that fire again, and the floor is rising to meet him, and he stokes his mind with his rage (and his love, all of it, because that’s here, even now)—and snaps his aim high as he squeezes the trigger.

The breaker bullet, straight and true, takes Elias in the heart.

He looks down for a moment, shocked enough that he drops the staff, and Jack empties the cylinder.