Its blood was already cooling on her hand and forearm.
“We’ve got to go,” she said.
From outside in the restaurant, someone shouted. And from further away, gunfire.
“Gotta help the others!” Jenna said. She dashed through into the restaurant, stepping over the body that might remain here forever.
As she followed, Lucy-Anne was already recognising what was happening because she had seen it all before. The shooting, the chaos, the death, and now the screams.
Nomad is coming to kill me, she thought. But fate carried her onwards, and she rode its insistent wave.
Out in the street, gunfire and shouts. The shooting was from some way off—Jack knew it was coming closer, though he could not worry about it right then—and the shouting was from Sparky. He was tangled with the bat thing on the road. They’d rolled out between two parked cars and now fought on the central white line, Sparky slashing with the knife, the creature thrashing to try to buck him off. His shouting was senseless, wordless, exhalations of both rage and fear. If Sparky stopped shouting, he might actually think about what he was doing.
Jack glanced the way Rhali had disappeared, and he actually took three steps in that direction. But his friend was before him, fighting for his life. And back in the restaurant, it was Hayden whom they had to all protect with their lives.
He breathed deeply, gathered his thoughts, and reached out. “Sparky,” he said.
Sparky glanced up and understood immediately, rolling aside, leaving his knife snagged in one of the thing’s tattered wings.
Jack lifted it up. It rose from the road, untouched, and paused in its screeching and thrashing to look around in wonder. He didn’t know what he was going to do with it. If he simply dropped it along the street it could well come at them again. Once again Jack thought, If only I could communicate with it, maybe—
Something dropped on him. It must have been up on the roof, waiting for an opportunity to leap down on some unsuspecting victim, and it crushed him down to the sidewalk. He lost his hold on the bat thing, fell, cracked his knee and elbow painfully, and as if drawn by pain the creature attacking him reached around and pressed its forearm across his wounded eye, pulling his head back and exposing his neck.
Jack threw his head back hard and felt it connect. The thing grunted and let him go, and Jack took the opportunity to stand and face it.
Beyond, the bat thing was running at Sparky once more.
The woman before him was naked and sleek, and she stank of gone-off fruit. Though not possessed of anything extra—no wings, or stings, or altered skin—still she was distinctly inhuman. Her head was elongated, her limbs too long and her body too thin, but it was her eyes that were most alien. They glimmered with an arrogant intelligence, as if she could see far more. And she looked so hungry.
Jack reached in and down, pleased at last at the clarity his universe had taken on once again.
Sparky screamed. Startled, Jack glanced across to see what could draw such a shocking noise from his friend, and then the woman was upon him again, knocking him back across a car bonnet. In an instinctive act he surged heat at her, and she groaned as the skin across her right shoulder and upper arm sizzled black. But still she came, falling on him and reaching for his face with both hands.
One finger scratched across his wounded eye. Jack gasped, writhed to dislodge her, punched at her without really seeing where she was. His fist connected with her teeth and he felt a surge of blood across his hand. His, and hers.
Sparky shouted again.
Jack tried to flip, but his universe was in chaos once again. Pain darkened it, and terror at what was happening—to Sparky, to Rhali, his other friends, and perhaps to Hayden as well—made him lose his way.
Gunfire, bullets, the rattle of lead hitting metal and the eruption of an explosion somewhere close by. Jack punched and kicked again but the strange woman was already gone.
A hand closed around his arm and hauled him upright. He blinked at the searing pain in his eye, closed it, and with his one good eye he saw Shade standing before him. He was more there than Jack had ever seen him, and he looked exhausted.
Behind him, Reaper. But this was a Reaper Jack had never seen before. Panting, sweating, eyes wide in desperation, his clothing awry and left arm held awkwardly across his body, desperation had almost taken him back to looking like Jack’s father.
“You better still have him, boy,” Reaper said.
At the far end of the street three Chopper motorcycles skidded around a corner. Above them the helicopter came in again, and its heavy machine gun started tearing the street apart.
Nomad’s eyes opened and she cried out at the dream she was still having.
Lucy-Anne and blood and then there is no more air because…
She stood, cautious still of the bomb and its traps. Summoning every scrap of what she had, everything that had set her apart since Doomsday and still did now, she became less human than she ever had before.
And in the blink of an eye, she went to change the future.
Lucy-Anne stood in the smashed window and looked out at the street, and she had seen some of this before. It wasn’t quite right…but even as she watched, events steered themselves towards what she knew was to come.
Reaper fell back as bullets ripped along the street. Jack was shoved across the car bonnet and fell onto the pavement, and the dark man who’d been holding him dropped behind the car. The vehicle jerked on its suspension as bullets stitched across the roof and windows exploded outwards.
“Jack!” Jenna called. She stood beside Lucy-Anne, eager to help but knowing that to do so would be suicide.
Can it get any worse? Lucy-Anne thought. She looked down beside her at Hayden cowering beneath the window sill. He was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to Fleeter’s face, and the girl’s limbs were jerking and slapping the floor.
“Sparky!” Jenna shouted. She darted out into the street just as the helicopter passed overhead in a roar and a cloud of dust. It was so low that Lucy-Anne could see the pilot’s eyes as he looked down, and she wondered what he saw. People? Or monsters?
There were both down here.
Sparky was lying across the other side of the street. He was on his back, one hand held up, one knee raised. His blond hair was now dark with blood. The thing attacking him had fled at the gunfire. Probably more sensible than they were.
Jenna was running towards him as the Chopper motorcycles powered along the street.
“Jenna, run!” Lucy-Anne shouted.
Reaper stood and turned towards the motorcycles. Now he’ll shout them to smithereens, Lucy-Anne thought, but he held his chest as he roared, and the result was not as dramatic as she expected.
The lead motorcycle swerved, struck a parked van and flipped, spilling its rider and rolling past Reaper and the prone Sparky. It missed Jenna by inches and smashed against another vehicle, spinning on its side on the street and then bursting into flames. Spilled fuel flowed, carrying the fire wide.
The rider stood on shaky legs, one hand pressed to her side, the other tugging a pistol from a holster on her belt. As she lifted the weapon the air around her hazed and she seemed to crumple, skin glistening with frost. She coughed, and ice formed in the air before her. A tall Asian woman appeared from the shadows behind her and knocked her aside. She knelt beside the fallen Chopper, pressed her mouth across the struggling woman’s mouth, and Lucy-Anne turned away.