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It started, as all things did, with trip to the supermarket and a joke in poor taste.
Jack didn’t really remember what they were looking for, be it socks or some dried fruit or industrial-size bottles of household chemicals for Quint to experiment with. He didn’t remember if it was the smell of rotting produce and milk that had long since soured, or the various warnings on the back of the bottle of cleaner, that inspired the line in the first place.
He remembered the quip that started it all, though, and maybe that was more than enough. It was a joke that fell flat, souring as quickly and utterly as supermarket milk once the power first went out.
Jack didn’t even remember who said it; probably him. He remembered the feel of the words in the air, the way they hung there, as sticky and cloying as one of those hard candies, left to melt in their bowls on the front desks of doctors’ offices.
“It’s enough to stop someone’s heart!”’
It wasn’t even that bad, really. Not on its own. But the threat of death was an ugly specter, and they’d had a terrible week; even for them.
Thrull was gone. The Tree was gone. It didn’t mean that they were okay, now. It didn’t mean they’d forgotten how easy it was for a pulse to slip away. This was the end of the world, after all. They were quite aware of death, the four of them. It was just that—
—Their week had brought it a little too close to home. And probably-Jack putting his foot in his mouth again wasn’t exactly helping matters.
“Sorry,” he thought he’d said. “I didn’t mean—”
June had shaken her head, at that. “Hang on. Do you guys know CPR? Do you think there’s any working AEDs left? Do you know any first aid?”
And that was how the whole thing began.
They didn’t know CPR; their collective knowledge of emergency medicine in general was as spotty as any half-clouded sky. There’d been a daring raid on the high school to steal some of those fancy plastic dummies (and the face shields; duh), and she’d drilled them on it, until Jack’s head swam, and maybe if it had been anything else, any time else, he would have begged a break, but this was life and death, and the end of the world, and he was not the kind of friend to forget how thin the thread all their lives had hung from really was.
Eventually, she deemed their work “acceptable.” And then there had been a whole thing about hunting up some of the less-destroyed AEDs, since chest compressions didn’t usually work on their own, and Quint tinkering with them until they were better than they’d ever been new. And then the monsters had wanted to know what they were doing.
Apparently monsters didn’t do CPR; instead there was a whole thing about hunting up a trained shocktail or a heart mage—apparently like a necromancer for the living, or something? Wasn’t that just a doctor-but-magic?—if you had the money and saw it coming, or if there’d be an important battle, important enough for a lot of the groups to pool their resources for it. Quint had muttered something about medical implications of multi-species semi-anarchistic societies with magic, and roped Bardle into helping him research how to deliver CPR and appropriate shocks to people that weren’t human.
Meanwhile, Jack lived, and he breathed, and he joked around with his friends, and tried not to think of everything they all knew was coming, because just because they’d defeated Thrull and destroyed the Tree didn’t mean they had won; didn’t mean they were safe.
His hands, laced together with the heels just so, pumped out their rhythms against his knee while he sat; half without noticing, a survival instinct, buried in the back of his lizard brain. Like his life depended on it.
Ah, ah, ah, ah; stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
June’s first aid teachers had had a really awful sense of humor.
The months passed, adventures and near-death-experiences and late night video game tournaments flicking past, bleeding into each other like the panels of a comic book left in the rain.
Even with everything that happened, they never once needed to restart a heart. Slowly, Jack relaxed.
Still his hands kept that desperate, steady tempo. You never knew, after all. If Jack Sullivan had a motto, it would probably be something about the apocalypse being innumerably—see, Quint, he knew fancy words!—better with buddies. But “never say never, ‘cause you never know” would probably be a solid second.
He lived by both principles; and by a third, unspoken, beating along with his heart, and the press of his hands against those dummies, when the moon was bright and his thoughts were dark and he just couldn’t sleep, when he needed some way to exorcise the ghosts and demons and nightmares following him around like some creepy parade of horror movie stalkers.
He couldn’t lose his friends. To death, least of all.
In the broken-window world they lived in, that was his greatest fear. Their world was sharp-edged and snag-toothed and wicked in the dark, no matter how beautifully it glimmered when the sun hit the cracks just so. Their world was shards of glass, and they were always cutting their hands against it: it was many things, and safe was not one of them.
Death haunted every empty building, every broken down car, every crack in the pavement, framed forever in his photographer’s eyes. It followed him home at night, and fear of his friends with their lives cut short had long ago made itself a bed in his heart.
The Nightmare King came, tormented them, died. The radio sat in its backpack, as silent as the rows of abandoned houses. A road trip was planned, and cut short; killed in its infancy, an idea smothered in its cradle by the silent snowfall.
The monsters were scared of snow. It wasn’t funny, but it really was, but also just sad, somehow; to see fearless warriors huddling under the awnings and hiding in Joe’s and their various dens and hollows and homes, taking shelter from every dusting.
They tried to fix it; Jack’s idea, Quint’s invention, June and Dirk solid behind them. The sled was eaten, and the slicer was stolen, and it all went downhill from there.
There was a moment when Jack wondered, briefly, wildly, desperately, crouched behind movie theater seats, the slicer back in his hand, otherworldly energy spilling from the screen and Dirk hardly breathing beside him, if CPR could keep someone from being a zombie, even if just for a minute or two. They’d found out with Alfred that they had no pulse; could forced circulation stave off that final transformation?
He never had to find out.
It turned out there was still mercy in their broken-glass mosaic of a world; they huddled behind a counter, and Dirk drank the eyeball goop, and somehow the world was saved, even if Evie and Ghazt had sort of won, in the end.
They lived, the four of them, and drank hot cocoa on a snowy morning, wishing each other a merry day-after-Christmas, and a happy New Year, too.
They lived, scarred and bruised and with eyes that looked older and older every day and with laughter bubbling up from somewhere they couldn’t even name anymore, and Jack tried to remember to breathe.
If he flipped through a stolen (but how could anything be stealing, now?) book called First Aid Essentials every night, before sleep ever found him, that was no one’s business but his own.
It was after they got the tail that it all began to fall apart. Quint was a ghost, a frenzied mutterer with an anxious smile. June was grim, chin high and lips bitten and the still-unnamed weapon always, always on her wrist. And most days, it was like Dirk wasn’t even there, anymore.
At night, Jack rinsed his raw and blistered hand; wrapped it up in a clean bandage like that would fix anything that mattered, and practiced on the first aid dummies. Tourniquets, bandages, choking, bleeding, broken bones, stopped hearts; everything June had taught him, so long, long ago.
Ah, ah, ah, ah; stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Ah, ah, ah, ah; stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
If only everything else could be fixed with secondhand Red Cross first aid training.
It was funny, how quickly everything went from “prolonged self destruct” to “ground zero”. And of course, where else would this happen but at the abandoned Dandy Lions ice cream parlor that Quint and Bardle had adopted as their makeshift tail dissection laboratory?
The world shattered in slow motion, splitting open in slivers, caught between the sheets of rain. Bardle grabbed his hand, and that feeling of unbearable static clawed its way through the Scrapken glove and up through his arm and into his head, his heart, his lungs. Thrull grinned; his teeth were as sharp and his breath as foul as they had ever been, and the triumph in his eyes was nothing new, either.
And then Jack was flying.
Jack hurt, hitting the pavement with a horrible thud. On autopilot, he ran through that memorized list, flipping quickly through now-ingrained triage: broken bones? Concussion? Life threatening bleeding? Nope, probably not, and not a bit; so he reached for the slicer and crawled to his feet.
Thrull was in there. Threatening Bardle.
No. No no nonono—
It was like watching a car crash; hearing a siren sound, far away, and knowing in the pit of his stomach that it couldn’t possibly get there in time.
The hammer came down, and Jack didn’t bother biting down his scream. It didn’t matter—no one would hear, not when the rain drowned all sound, when the wind swallowed it and whisked it far away. The weather itself was howling, and what was his heart, ripped open, in the whirlpool of its grief?
Something thundered; light bloomed, shattering and catching and glowing in every drop of the torrential rain. Like a thunderstorm; but wrong, but wrong, so very, very, wrong.
Because somewhere along the line, buried in the months of building up and fighting for Town Square and the weeks of fruitless, painful training, the heavy conversations and heavier burdens and heaviest trust, crystallizing over pizza rolls and bike jumps and fear and wanting to be remembered, wanting to matter, the conjurer with the strange scowls and sharpened swords had become a friend. And Jack knew: without friends, the world was a wasteland. They gave every quest, every heartbeat, purpose.
He didn’t want to see his friend die.
Bardle was thrown; landed in the corner of the shop, in a place where the roof hadn’t yet caved in. Thrull turned away; stepped into the parking lot.
Bardle stood. It was like the rain stood still, like his heart froze mid-beat, like time itself was balanced on the point of Dirk’s finest sewing needle.
Thrull took the tail, his back turned to his enemy, still breathing; crowed out his alleged victory. Jack couldn’t care less. Let him have it, so long as Bardle stood.
He wasn’t the siren, too far from the burning building, and with all the roads shut down. He wasn’t a good runner, but he was better than the boy he’d been once ever would have believed. If he sprinted, he could reach Bardle before Thrull realized he’d failed.
They could win this, still. They could all come out alive.
Bardle stood, sword trembling in his hands. Thrull was facing off with his friends, now, and Evie was there too, and if Jack had any spare room in his brain he would’ve feared, but there was no room left for fear; not when the wind ripped it from his pores and the rain washed it away as gently as a power washer; not when Bardle still stood, but only barely.
He trusted his friends. They would be okay. He just needed to reach them all…
Bardle was on his knees, now, sword still clutched in one hand, and Jack was just on the other side of the ruined wall.
“Bardle,” he gasped, and he was there.
“Jack,” Bardle answered, and his voice was a whisper, the last bit of fraying thread stuck to the scissors. “I am sorry…”
“But you survived, you’re okay” Jack pressed. “I need to know, is there any bleeding, any pain, can you breathe okay?”
The conjurer huffed, the slightest breath of air, and it might have been his dry, oddly-pitched laugh, if Jack listened very closely.
“I am not okay. I spent too much energy on the spells,” he dismissed, pressing on to what he must have thought the meat of the matter. His voice was thin, as thin as the shredded page of a waterlogged newspaper. “It absorbed the hammer blow, and I have nothing left. But that doesn’t matter. The power can be yours now, entirely. It is—it is your choice, Jack, your burden. I am so very sorry…”
“Shut up,” Jack said. He could feel something rising up in his throat, choking him. Outside, Thrull bellowed something. “I need to take your pulse. I don’t know where the good artery for that would be for you. Is it your wrist? It’s the wrist for humans, the wrist and the neck.”
He picked up Bardle’s arm; the sword had fallen from his hand. There were a lot of layers of sleeves; he pushed them up, but the rain took the glove’s suckers and made them slick, and for every sleeve he pushed back, three more fell down again.
The rain lashed at the ruined roofing, screaming and clattering in the broken pipes and vents and crawl spaces littering the ceiling. He felt his heart speed up, even in the shards of space that remained. Maybe there was some room for fear left, after all. Maybe, like an ugly and tenacious weed, it never really left somebody once it had grown its roots into them.
“Go… fight,” Bardle wheezed; a hiss of breath through lungs he understood only well enough to know that they were failing. “In your hands…”
There—Jack had his wrist.
It turned out whatever species he was had an artery in the same place humans did, or close enough.
He found his pulse just in time to feel it give way to nothing.
Jack moved his fingers, hoping against hope that no, he’d just found a false spot, that happened sometimes, like why you should never take a pulse with your thumb because your thumb had its own pulse, different enough from your actual heart rate to give you a crazy answer. It was just a false spot, and he’d find Bardle’s real pulse, and everything would be fine.
After going up and down the conjurer’s arm, Jack conceded that Bardle didn’t have a pulse anymore, and with hands too used to this to tremble, anymore, fished that face shield rescued from the high school out of his pocket, straightened Bardle out on the ground, knelt squarely next to him, and made his best guess for where a humanoid monster should receive chest compressions.
“Bardle!” He shouted as loud as he dared, and shook the conjurer’s arm just to be sure. And Bardle did not respond.
(Quint and Dirk had drawn up diagrams, one for every species of appropriate anatomy, June making critical notes in the margins. They faded and washed away behind his eyes, carried away by time and the ceaseless rain, and Jack could not remember.)
“There’ll be time for this to be awkward after you survive,” Jack whispered, putting his hands on the center of the chest; it wasn’t Bardle, anymore, it was just another practice dummy, and this was just another nightmare to give strength to his well-worn routine. His fingers were laced, the heels one on top of the other, his shoulders right above it all, his elbows locked and ready.
Compressions were habit, by now; ah, ah, ah, ah; stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive. Two inches deep, the chest returning to its normal position before the next began. 30 compressions, and then the head was tilted back; two fingers on the chin, the hand on the forehead; you sealed the face shield, and blew into the mouth twice, for one second each. And then you let yourself breathe, checked to see if they were breathing yet, if their heart had started again, and then your hands were back on the chest again. 30 compressions, two breaths. Ah, ah, ah, ah; stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
And repeat.
The sounds of the rain, of Thrull and Evie and his friends, the wind and all its screaming, fell away, and there was just what there had always been: Jack, his fears, and a body without a heartbeat; and his own body, too, well-trained by now in what it needed to do.
When a hand tapped his shoulder, he almost fell over. June was looking at him, her eyes hard in that way that meant she didn’t want to cry.
“Rule three,” she said; not softly, but with something kinder and sharper than gentleness. “Scoot over and let somebody else take over after a while. Quint’s getting the AED ready.”
He fell back, more than scooted, those impossible words ringing in his ears. June was businesslike, shucking off her weapon and settling herself on her knees and beginning compressions with quick, economical motions.
AED. Quint’s got an AED. He finished the thing. It didn’t get forgotten in everything else, it’s done—
Jack really shouldn’t have doubted him.
If they’d be using an AED, then it might matter that the roof was broken; you weren’t supposed to use them in water, and the floor was dampened by the rain. But they’d been in a relatively sheltered spot; nothing else would be any drier.
The rainwater swirled in said less sheltered spots; it had to be at least an inch deep, by now. It mushed together with the tail goo and the mold and sour ice cream and the sprinkles, washing it all together and hastening it out through the holes in the walls, and it was gone.
Quint came into his field of vision, the AED in his hands. June saw him coming; picked her weapon up again and slipped it on her wrist. She flicked it to a knife, and cut off Bardle’s cloaks.
The placement of the pads was weird; it wasn’t quite where Jack would have expected, had Bardle been human. But he wasn’t, and it seemed Quint’s research was paying off.
“Clear!” He said, and they all stood back.
It took three shocks; and then Bardle was breathing, and that thing that had been sitting on Jack’s chest lightened, somehow, and he realized Dirk wasn’t here, but before he could panic June was telling him that he was just getting Big Mama, and Jack wasn’t sure why, but he started laughing, and then they all were.
They’d lived; all of them.
Maybe that song wasn’t in such bad taste, after all. It could stay; after all, it had worked.
Bardle was alive. He held onto that, as tightly as he knew how. And he wasn’t the type to give love a loose grip.
“We’re alive,” Jack said, and felt his relief in the stillness of his hands, settling themselves by his side; like they didn’t know what to do with themselves once the battle was won. “We’re all alive.”
“We’re alive,” Quint echoed, packing up the AED. June nodded, arranging Bardle’s ripped cloaks back over him.
“Let’s get him in the car,” she said. “And then I’m thinking we take a nap.”
“Nap sounds good,” Jack said. “Could do with some sleep.”
They waited, in the gutted building, for their friend and their truck and for everything and nothing at all.
We’re alive, Jack said again, to himself only. We made it.
They still weren’t safe. Maybe they’d never be. But just for tonight—
Just for tonight, he’d sleep easy.
The rain wept on. But it wasn’t grief, anymore, or rage; a different kind of tears.
Jack closed his eyes, and let it come down.