Chapter Six
Joshua was holding him against his chest, gently but with such obvious strength that Max knew even she would be hard-pressed to take him away. She didn't think Joshua had even realized she and Logan had arrived, because his attention was on Alec. Alec, who was lying so still in Joshua's arms, his head hanging back over Joshua's arm, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Joshua had folded himself almost in half and had his forehead pressed against Alec's chest.
Despite the howling and crying, Alec wasn't responding at all.
She heard Logan entering the room behind her, heard his gasp of shock, and turned toward him slowly. There were no words they could give each other that would make the scene they'd just walked in on any less horrific, but the look in his eyes, a look she knew was reflected in her own, expressed everything he was thinking.
The room was lit only by another single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, a light so weak that it didn't even manage to chase the shadows out of the corners. It had two rough stone walls, two block walls, and a dirt floor. It smelled of mold, decay, and rot. It smelled of disease and filth. It smelled of a hundred years of death.
Alec was lying right in the middle of it, and she was having a hard time believing that he hadn't already become one of the dead that the room reeked of.
His shirt was gone, and he was barefoot. His jeans were caked with dirt, and so much blood that shouldn't have been obvious but was, and a hundred other things that she didn't even want to think about. A chain around his right ankle and padlocked in place secured him to some sort of stake that had been driven into the floor. His skin was deathly pale, his cheeks were flushed, and his hair was soaked with sweat. She knew he'd only been missing for three days – three days when no one had looked for him, no one had even realized he was gone – but he looked like he'd been there for weeks.
A large, hastily and sloppily-applied bandage covered his entire right side, from the bottom of his ribs to under the waist of his jeans, from his back to his navel. It had been soaked-through with blood, some old and dark and some so bright that it had to be fresh. Max wondered if Joshua had reopened whatever wound was under that bandage when he'd lifted Alec up from the floor. She wondered if Alec had even felt it.
It wasn't the blood on the bandage that scared her, though, because she'd been expecting that; there was too much blood in the room upstairs for him to not have been bleeding from somewhere. No, what worried her the most was the dark yellow substance that spread out beyond it, soaking the bandage to the point of saturation, and starting to seep out underneath it. She could see where streaks of it had dried on Alec's skin, see the angry red lines that poked out from under the edges of the gauze.
It was infected, and badly. That was what she had smelled from the bottom of the stairs.
She'd spent so long frozen in place, staring at Alec in horror, that she hadn't noticed when Logan had started to move forward. She didn't see him kneeling down across from Joshua, didn't see him reaching a hesitant hand toward Alec's neck until it was almost too late.
"Logan, no!" she called out in warning.
Joshua's head snapped up and he snarled at Logan in hatred, barring his teeth and growling again. Logan pulled his hand back so fast that he lost his balance and landed hard on the ground behind him.
Max shook herself out of the shock that had taken control of her and stepped forward. "Joshua," she said softly. "Joshua, stop. It's Logan. He's our friend, remember? He's here to help."
"He is not us!" Joshua roared. "He is upstairs people! Upstairs people hurt Alec!"
"I know," she said softly as she knelt down across from him, taking over the spot Logan had been forced to vacate. "I know they did, Joshua, but Logan won't. Logan is a good man, and he's Alec's friend." She didn't care if that was true or not, though she had a feeling that it was. "He won't hurt him."
She was close enough to Alec that she should have been able to hear him breathing, but she couldn't. She reached out to him, her hand trembling as she placed her fingers against his neck and pressed down. At first there was nothing, and she closed her eyes.
Late. They were too late.
But wait... there was something. It was faint, so faint that she'd missed it at first, and erratic, but it was there. Her head snapped up and she spun to face Logan, determination replacing fear.
"He's alive," she announced. "We have to get him out of here."
Logan pushed himself to his feet and walked past her, then crouched down by Alec's feet to inspect the chain around his ankle. Max didn't move from where she knelt, her hand now resting against Alec's chest, feeling the small movements it made as Alec breathed in and out.
'Alive,' she told herself. 'He's still alive.'
She turned to look at the chain, too. It was thin, like the ones she'd seen people put on their dogs, and it was attached to the same kind of stake the she'd seen those chains hooked to. Anger and hatred spiked through her, and she had to swallow the bile that swelled up from her stomach.
They'd chained him up like a dog, in a filthy, stinking room with a dirt floor, with an open, festering wound in his side. They'd treated him like some sort of animal.
"His feet are cut," Logan said. He glanced around the room quickly. "They're cut deep, like he's been walking on broken glass or sharp rocks."
Max looked back down at Alec's too-pale and too-still face. Even with all this activity around him, he still hadn't stirred.
"He tried to run," she said, and she knew with certainty that was exactly what had happened. "That's why they chained him up. He tried to escape."
'Because you weren't here to save him.'
She shook her head again and pushed the self-recrimination away to be dealt with later. It wasn't that she didn't think she deserved it. She just didn't have time for it, and neither did Alec.
"Joshua," she said. "I need you to pull that stake out of the ground so we can get Alec out of here. Will you let Logan hold him while you do that?"
Joshua seemed to consider it, but only for a second. Then he nodded his head. "Logan take care of Alec."
Logan stepped up beside Joshua and knelt on the ground at his side. Transferring Alec from Joshua's arms to Logan's wasn't difficult, but it was slightly awkward, and Alec's right arm flopped around and thumped limply against the floor.
Max took his wrist in her hand and started to put it across his chest carefully, but when she saw the skin, she stopped. His arm was covered in small puncture wounds, all of which had streaks of blood dried around them. Her eyes continued up his arm, across his shoulder, then down his chest. Everywhere she looked, she found more of them.
"They tortured him," she whispered. When she looked up at Logan, she knew there were tears in her eyes, but she didn't care. "Why would they do that?"
"Knowing them?" Logan didn't look like he really wanted to answer her, but she knew that he respected her enough to tell her the truth anyway. "Probably for fun."
Max had never wanted to kill any Ordinary as badly as she wanted to kill those four at that moment, but she bit her tongue and said nothing.
Logan shifted Alec slightly in his arms and moved his feet so that at least some of Alec's weight rested on his legs. Then he moved his left hand, which had been supporting Alec's right side, and pressed it against his cheek instead.
"Alec?" he said softly as he tapped Alec on the face lightly. "Can you hear me? Alec?"
Logan glanced up at Max, and she shook her head slowly. Alec hadn't stirred when Joshua had been howling in his face; no way would he respond to someone as quiet as Logan was being. Logan's eyes narrowed and his eyebrows lowered as he turned his attention back to Alec.
First, Logan flipped his hand around so that it was the back of his hand resting against Alec's cheek. Then he pulled his hand away from Alec's face entirely and pressed it against his chest. When he leaned down and pressed his lips to Alec's forehead, Max couldn't contain her confusion anymore.
"What are you doing?"
"He's burning up," Logan explained. "Sometimes I can make a pretty decent estimate of how high a fever is, but your bodies run so much hotter than mine..."
"Hold Alec still."
Logan shifted again. His right arm was already behind Alec's shoulders, and he put his left hand against the side of Alec's face again. He was holding Alec as tightly against his chest and shoulder as he could, carefully avoiding the bandage, not wanting to cause him anymore pain. Max moved to her right slightly, put one hand on Alec's knee and the other on his ankle, just above the chain, to keep his leg from moving. She glanced back to Logan for confirmation that he was ready, and he nodded at her.
"Go, " she told Joshua.
It took him a few good pulls, but Joshua managed to get the stake out of the ground. The movement yanked against the chain, digging it deeper into the skin of Alec's leg, and Max could see fresh blood running down his ankle. But even that didn't get a response; Alec still lay there, limp and frail and broken in Logan's arms.
Joshua moved quickly to kneel at Alec's left side again. Logan shifted his position enough to hold Alec up while Joshua slid his left arm under Alec's knees carefully, and his right arm under his back. Max picked up the stake and put it in Joshua's hand, so he could hold it up and out of his way. Logan settled Alec's head against Joshua's chest, then pushed himself to his feet and out of the way.
Joshua stood slowly and carefully, obviously mindful of just how important his responsibility was. He adjusted Alec's weight in his arms ever-so-slightly, but it was enough to throw off his balance. Joshua stepped back to keep himself from toppling over, and Alec's right arm and head fell back over Joshua's arm and dangled there, lifelessly.
Max couldn't help the gasp that escaped her at the sight, and neither could Logan. But it was Logan who moved first.
Very gently, Logan took Alec's head in his hands and lifted until he was laying Alec back against Joshua, tucked in against his neck. He did the same with Alec's arm, carefully placing it across his chest. Joshua wrapped his right hand around Alec's upper arm to keep it from falling loose again.
"Gotta blaze," Joshua said.
Max nodded and turned on her heel. She stopped in the door just long enough to look up and down the hallway, checking for exits. There was one only a few feet away, at the end of the corridor on the right, and she turned toward it. She pushed the door open and looked down when she heard a strange crunching sound under her feet. She closed her eyes briefly, then glanced back at Logan, who was following Joshua out of the room.
"Broken glass," she said.
Logan didn't answer, just shook his head sadly. This was where Alec's escape attempt had ended, then, less than ten feet from where it had started.
Max still didn't understand how they'd known he was running. Even weak, even injured, even running barefoot on broken glass, Alec still wouldn't have made a sound.
She got her answer when she reached the top of the concrete steps and pushed the bulkhead door open, and an alarm started blaring.
"Damn it!" she said as she stepped outside quickly. "Faster, Joshua. We gotta move." She held the bulkhead open as Joshua emerged with Alec in his arms, with Logan following close behind them.
The three of them sank into the shadows and ran from the house as quickly as they could. They were three blocks away, in a stand of trees in a park, when Logan called for Max to stop.
"What?" she demanded, turning to face him. "We have to keep moving. We've got to get him to Dr. Carr."
"I know that, Max," Logan said calmly. "But he's not gonna make it if we keep bouncing him around like this." He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. "You make a run for it, back to Crash. Get the car and bring it back here."
"No! What if he...?"
"You run a lot faster than I do," Logan pointed out. "And if something happens and we need to move again, Joshua's the only one who can carry him."
She knew he was right, knew that getting the car would get Alec to help sooner, and with a lot less jostling and exposure to less contamination, than Joshua carrying him through the sewers.
"We've got him, Max. Go."
She nodded her head quickly and blurred away.
Logan turned back to Joshua and Alec, running his hand through his hair as he did.
"Where Max go?"
"She's going to get my car," Logan answered. "We're going to wait for her here, for as long as we can. If those Steelheads get back before she does, though, we might have to move."
"Steelheads come here," Joshua growled, "they not go anywhere again."
Logan nodded his head, because there wasn't any way he could argue with that. And he didn't think he would even if he could have.
"Okay, let's get him settled for a while," Logan said. He helped Joshua lower Alec to the ground, and helped him sit on the ground with Alec's upper back against his chest. Then Logan stood and took off his jacket.
"Wrap this around him," he said as he handed it to Joshua. It was chilly now that night had fallen, and there was a constant mist in the air. Alec was already shivering from cold, which his fever would only intensify, and the last thing he needed was to get any sicker than he was. "We'll be able to warm him up easier in the car, but that should help a bit, at least."
Joshua took off his own jacket and laid it across Alec's chest. Then he looked at Logan, who was settling to the ground beside them.
"Logan is upstairs people," Joshua said.
Logan nodded his head sadly. "I know. And I'm so sor..."
"Logan is good people. Good friend to Alec."
"Thank you, Joshua." Logan smiled a tired smile. "So are you."
"Max be back soon," Joshua said. "Alec will be okay now? Not hurt or sick? Better?"
"Yeah," Logan answered with a nod of his head. "Yeah, Alec'll get better now. He'll be fine." Joshua smiled at him, as though he believed every word.
Logan looked down at Alec's face, so pale even in the darkness. His condition hadn't improved any in the past hour, but he was out of that place, and back with people who cared about him. He was struck by just how young Alec looked at that moment, by how young he actually was, and by the fact that he'd only existed in the real world for a few weeks. It wasn't fair that this had happened to him, not when he'd actually seemed to be making some progress in breaking himself away from Manticore.
He reached out and gently brushed away a clump of sweaty hair that had fallen into Alec's eyes.
"He'll be just fine." Logan could tell from the look on Joshua's face that he'd managed to convince the dog-man that his words were the truth.
If only it were so easy to convince himself.