Chapter 20: Paragon

 

“No.”

Hargrove’s gurgling laughter is thick in Jarod’s ears, the taunting of it as horrible and as painful as the blast of trumpets. But that can’t compare with the pain in his throat, at seeing the only boy who matters seize at his chest. Gabriel’s lashes flutter. He collapses to the ground in a crumpled heap.

“No.”

The laughter heightens in pitch and in frequency until it’s like the screeching of so many birds, the scraping of metal, like a pit to the center of the earth has opened and a thousand thousand souls are shrieking in grief. Whether they mourn for Hargrove or for Gabriel, Jarod can’t say. He falls to his knees.

Acrid smoke fills the room, entering Jarod’s nostrils, the thickness of it suffocating. It’s rising from the puddle of sludge that was once Hargrove, the tarry, black substance sinking into the cracks in the floor, the rest of him rising in a steaming, horrible mist that chokes at Jarod’s lungs.

Still, the tears streaming down his face aren’t from the sting of the smoke. He crawls for Gabriel’s limp body, hardly able to breathe from the constricting in his chest. That isn’t painful. Not the smoke, not the screaming in the air. Nothing will ever be as painful. He cradles Gabriel’s head in his lap, pulling him to his chest.

The screams and the laughter fade, and Hargrove is gone. In his place, he leaves death. Jarod looks about him, through the blur of his tears. Nessa’s head lowered to the ground, her tentacles as limp as her body. Robbie staked to the wall, motionless, the remnants of his flesh throbbing, twitching, like Paragon doesn’t recognize that its host is dead and gone.

Everything. Hargrove’s taken everything. Jarod weeps into Gabriel’s hair, missing the lushness and length of it, how he could run his fingers through it and know that he was protected, that this boy would be someone to protect. And tonight, as with a different night a lifetime ago, Jarod has failed.

“All your fault,” something in his head says. In the air, snatches of words that sound vaguely like “I told you so” fill the room. But no one is speaking. It’s all in his head. All his fault.

Magpie’s hand is over her mouth. Tyler’s expression is a mix of sorrow and unbridled rage, every muscle in his body tense, his breathing causing his torso to shudder. Esther’s face is heavy even as she rushes to Gabriel’s side. Daniel is deathly serious as he kneels by Jarod, already tearing through his bag at top speed in search of everything he needs.

Deft fingers rip Gabriel’s shirt open. Daniel’s gentler as he pulls the material away, exposing Gabriel’s old scars, and there, on his chest, this newest wound. A slow trickle of blood streams from it. The damage goes deep, far enough that Jarod can’t make out the depth of the puncture from the blood that keeps welling up at the hole. The wound itself is small, not much larger than the claw Hargrove stuck clear through Gabriel’s body. But that brings Jarod no comfort.

“CPR,” Tyler says. “Something. Anything.”

“He’s bleeding openly from his chest.” Daniel rakes at his hair in frustration. “What if that thing hit his heart? I don’t know what to do.” He looks to Esther, who only shakes her head in response. Daniel’s voice goes faint. “I don’t know what to do.”

If he pretends, Jarod could almost believe that Gabriel was only sleeping. The edges of his face seem softer like this, his jaw unclenched and loose, like how it is when he’s completely relaxed, when it’s only the two of them in the room and he doesn’t have to pretend to be something or someone else. If he wishes hard enough, maybe he’ll open his eyes again. “I killed him.”

“You didn’t,” Esther says, her voice harsh, her hand gripping tightly around Jarod’s wrist. “Don’t do this to yourself. Not now, not when he needs you.”

Jarod gapes, searching Gabriel’s face for signs of life. But it doesn’t look like he’s breathing, and his skin is pale, going paler.

“His heart,” Jarod says. “Hargrove went for his heart. I just know it. We can’t bring him back.”

Esther looks between Gabriel and the two bodies in the room, Nessa on the platform, and Robbie on the wall.

“Never. Not that. No.”

“Then there’s not much we can do,” Esther says softly. She reaches out, sweeping a fringe of hair away from Gabriel’s brow, wiping at the sweat.

“He can’t be gone.” Dabbing at the wound with a gauze pad, Daniel peers closer, his eyes heavy. “It isn’t as bad as it looks. It can’t be. The wound is tiny. But I can’t tell how deep it goes.” He lowers his head even further, like he’s bringing his ear closer to listen. His forehead wrinkles.

“What is it?” Jarod doesn’t even care that he sobs as he speaks. “What is it?”

“He’s breathing. It doesn’t look like it, but he’s breathing.”

Esther bends down. “How is that possible?” Gabriel’s chest and stomach don’t rise and fall, but she presses her fingers to his neck, against his wrist. “God. He’s alive.” She raises an eyebrow as she looks up at Jarod.

“What did Hargrove do to him?”

Esther shakes her head. Daniel cleans the wound stubbornly, packing it with gauze, fuming from the lack of understanding of what the problem truly is.

“It’s the best I can do,” he pronounces sadly.

It’s all he can do. How do they treat something they don’t even understand? Is it poison, a paralyzing agent, or the same dark magic that brought Paragon into being? What did Hargrove do to Gabriel?

“We have to bring him back. Please. I can’t – I can’t live without him. This can’t be how it ends.”

A voice burbles from behind him. “But that isn’t how this ends.”

“Samuels, look out.” Tyler shoves past their huddle, machete in hand.

The puddle of tar, what’s left of it, at least, has reformed enough to jut out part of a torso, the gleaming, obsidian face attached to its rudimentary head a pale imitation of how Hargrove once looked. Thick strings of liquid shadow break and bind as it opens its mouth to issue a final laugh – and one final command.

“Initiate self-destruct sequence.”

Tyler roars as he swings his machete, sending the head exploding into an infinite number of tiny, black droplets. They dissipate before they hit the ground, and just like that, Hargrove is no more.

But the sirens are back, blaring louder than ever, tinging the world in red. The sound of the alarms screaming prompts motion anew from a different part of the room. From the far wall, what’s left of Robbie, the gore-soaked smear of his crushed torso, it convulses and flails. Eyes shut, the boy’s mouth opens. He bellows.

From somewhere that sounds too close, too nearby, the horde answers. With Nessa gone, with her tentacles deactivated, even reinforced doors won’t stop them from swarming the facility.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Tyler yells. “Now.”

“Not leaving without him,” Jarod answers, clutching Gabriel tightly to his chest.

“Who said we were?” Tyler pulls Jarod to his feet, helping him lift Gabriel up in his arms.

“I can do it,” Jarod says, somehow able to communicate his gratitude over the deafening howl of klaxons. “Focus on escaping.” He grunts as he steadies Gabriel’s body, making sure his head doesn’t loll, that he’s fine. He’ll pull through this. He’ll come back. Jarod just isn’t sure how.

“This way,” Esther says, leading the charge.

She brings them down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, upward, ever upward, closer to the surface, to freedom. They hit an intersection, one that Jarod recognizes will take them to the backlot, to the dumpsters where he once used to deliver those bags of frozen matter, the facility’s garbage that he’s now certain was always human body parts, hacked up corpses. No doubt in his mind now.

Hargrove, Vertex, the root of all evil, but as soon as they get out of here – if they get out of here – they’ll be far away from all that, safer, some place that corruption will no longer touch them. Not any of his friends, not Gabriel, not ever.

They turn the intersection, but Esther hesitates. “Other way.”

“What?” Magpie says. “No time for that.”

Esther shoves her. “Other way. Now.”

They run. Jarod trusts her that much, even more now that he hears what it is they’re running from. Behind them, footfalls fill the corridor, uneven and stumbling, matching pace with their group. Louder than the sound of running, of course, is their baying and howling. The dead are catching up, and they’re hungry.

Not far now. Another exit here, through the kitchens in the cafeteria, and if they make it they’ll only have to pray that the horde has fully infiltrated the facility, that none of the dead are waiting outside to trap them. They weave past the long tables and benches, Tyler clearing them like hurdles as he heads straight for the exit. He gets there first, slamming it open and holding it for the rest of their party.

“Come the fuck on,” he screams, his voice thin against the howling of both the undead and the facility’s sirens.

Cold air greets them as they meet the outside world. Tyler and Magpie hang back, doing what little they can to barricade the door with one of the smaller dumpsters. The wind yowls as it whips through the compound, like it doesn’t mean to give them respite from the chaos they’ve only narrowly escaped. But to what end? The dead are just on their tail, the sound of them slamming and colliding stupidly with the furniture in the cafeteria just another sign of their desperation and relentlessness for human flesh.

All they can do is keep running. Further and faster, as far as they’ll dare. They make it to the middle of the compound when Esther sets down her bag again, making to unzip it. She shakes her head and gives a limp salute.

“It’s been a pleasure, boys.”

Behind her, the first of the zombies breaks through the back door, leaving it in splinters, clambering over the dumpster like it wasn’t there. A hideous series of metal clangs issues across the lot as the rest of the horde slams against the dumpster, taking the most direct line it can find between themselves and the living.

Then the world goes up in flame.

Huge gouts of fire spill out of the door, like the breath of dragons, enflaming and incinerating the zombies gathered there. Glass shatters throughout every building in the compound, shortly before more fire erupts from every opening. The ground shakes horribly as deep in the earth, every level of the facility explodes in glorious destruction. The perfect ivory veneer of the colossus begins to crack.

“Shit,” Esther says, hefting her bag up over her shoulder again. “Keep running.”

They don’t need to be told twice. The earth continues to tremble as they race away from the compound. Jarod’s arms scream and threaten to abandon his body, the weight of Gabriel dragging at him. But he can’t leave him. Jarod’s let him down enough. He can’t ever let that happen again. He looks down at Gabriel’s face, still pallid, lit orange now in the glow of the flames. His skin is clammy, cold. What Jarod would give for one last chance to make him happy, to show him that he’s all that matters.

A hideous cracking issues from behind them, and Jarod turns his head just enough to see the cement and the asphalt splitting into fissures all about the compound. They stop running, now that they’re far enough out to be safe from the effects of the sinkhole.

“Dear god,” Magpie says, her fingers hovering over her mouth.

The colossus crumbles into its basest components, flaming, jagged pieces of white rubble and dust spilling into the massive hole the explosion has dug into the earth. As the lower levels disintegrate, so does the rest of the facility, swallowed completely by the sinkhole, this pit of flame, a funeral pyre for the once-great colossus. Vertex returns to hell, back where it belongs. Somehow, it doesn’t give Jarod any sense of gratification.

In silence, those who survived keep walking, away from the fire, for what feels like minutes, then hours, until they’ve made it out of the compound, past the wall, and onto the road that leads out of Pleasance. Warmer now from the conflagration, the night is tinged with the terrible glow of the fires, everything seemingly cast in orange and red. But the color is too intense, spreading across the ground. And aren’t they too far from Vertex now for their surroundings to look like this?

No. The sun is rising. That’s why. The light seeps across the earth, the shadows lifting as if peeling back to reveal some horrible truth that the night kept shrouded from them. And as the world fills with sun, as they go further down the road, Jarod sees that very truth.

Up ahead of them is the blockade, the encampment that forced Jarod and Gabriel to turn back when it exploded into chaos from the bite of a single infected child. This was the original barrier, the one that kept them from leaving Pleasance and joining the outside world. Rain and wind have worked away at the sandbags, and the frenzy of that night mostly razed the encampment to the ground.

In their place is a fence, loosely thrown up across the perimeter, undefended. Even on this side it’s plain to see what the signage says. “Quarantined.” In smaller letters, on a different part of the fence, another sign reads “gas leak.” The road just in front of the encampment is littered with concrete dividers, the asphalt itself untouched and unused for too long. And down that same road, much, much further ahead, just visible on the horizon, are moving pinpricks of light. Cars. Headlights. Truckers making their early morning routes.

The world has been fine all along. It simply forgot that Pleasance existed.

Tyler hurls his machete at the asphalt. “Fuck this.”

“They forgot about us,” Daniel says. “How? Our families. Friends. Didn’t anyone ask?”

“I have no answers.” Esther shakes her head, her fingers digging into her temples like she’s staving off a migraine. “And if we find out what they are I know they’re just going to make me very, very angry.” She sinks to the ground, sitting there, legs splayed apart.

Magpie sighs. “The silver lining,” she says, “is that the world is fine. As far as we know. There’s something to come back to. Something to come home to.” She pats Esther on the head, smoothing down her hair. “Just a little further.”

“We don’t stop here,” Jarod says, insistent, resisting the anger building in his throat. They’d been forgotten. The world just kept going without them.

Esther gapes, like she’s trying to push out words she can’t find. She grumbles, then mutters, then throws up her hands as she groans. “See if there’s anything to salvage.” In the muscles of her face, Jarod finds remnants of the leader she was – and still is – returning along with the strength in her voice. “Preserved food, water, anything. And check for zombies. You never know.”

“Whoever put up this fence must have made sure they were all gone,” Magpie says. “But okay. Good point.”

They fan out, spreading throughout the camp, weapons at the ready, picking at the supplies to prepare for what, Jarod hopes, is the final leg of their journey. He sits in the grass, the blades of them cool and dewy even through his jeans. Gabriel’s head rests in his lap, and he strokes at his hair, running fingers against his scalp and his forehead.

The air is sweet out here, so far from the rancid decay of the broken city that was Pleasance. If anything, that should be good for Gabriel. Once they’ve rested enough, they’ll make it out onto the main roads, hitch a ride, find shelter, a hospital. Surely someone can help him.

It’s a little warmer now, with the sun spreading its gaze across the desert. He raises his eyes, squinting into its light, admitting to himself that this much, at least, brings him some modicum of joy. He looks down at Gabriel, smiling quietly to himself when the sun touches his chest, his chin, his face, bathing him in a light that brings his skin closer to how it’s colored when he’s healthy, when he’s fine.

Gabriel coughs, then sputters. His eyes open. Jarod’s heart leaps out of his throat.

“Gabriel?” He struggles to stay calm, to not toss Gabriel’s head helplessly around in his lap. He lowers his voice, speaking as softly as he can. Best not to shock him. “Gabriel. Can you hear me?”

“Hmm,” Gabriel says, in the muzzy voice of someone who’s just awakened from sleep. He looks around himself – at Jarod’s face, then the sun, and back – then winces when he tries to raise his head.

“Not yet,” Jarod says. “You’re injured.”

“I remember. He fucked me up good.” Gabriel turns his head, then winces again. “Ah, shit. That smarts. I think I’ll be okay, though.”

Venom, a toxin, demon magic, whatever. It’s not important what knocked Gabriel out all this time. It’s as of little importance as what woke him up. The sun, perhaps, its warmth, or its light. What counts is that he’s back. Jarod bends as far down as he can dare, planting a kiss on Gabriel’s forehead.

“The others are looking for supplies. They’ll be so happy to see you’re okay. We made it out of Vertex. We’re at the encampment again. Remember? And once we’re ready, we’re going to head out.”

Gabriel looks down at his chest, his lashes fluttering when he blinks. “And then what? Where do we go?”

Best not to tell him that the world is unchanged just yet. Best to let him see for himself. Jarod shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out once we hit the road.”

“How did we get here anyway?”

“I carried you,” Jarod says, a pinch of pride in his voice.

“All that way?” Gabriel blinks again, incredulous. “But we took a car the last time. The drive, it’s far out.”

Jarod smiles. “I know.”

“I can walk the rest of the way.” Gabriel arches up again, then lurches, grimacing from the pain.

“Stop that,” Jarod scolds. “You’re hurting. You don’t have to walk. I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”

“You will?” Gabriel grins weakly, his teeth perfect in the morning sun, his brown eyes glinting. “My hero. You’re the best.”

“Anything for you,” Jarod says, and he knows that he means it. The breath catches in his lungs. “Everything.”