lost cause
FRIDAY, APRIL 6
They’re halfway through Massachusetts when Jon starts complaining about getting something to eat.
They could make it the rest of the way without it, but they’re still all battered from the fight. They make another stop for gas. Glenn fills her up, muttering about his arm the whole time, and Nick calls Charlie to check in again. “Yeah, he’s fine. I said he’s fine. Kid’s not going anywhere.”
They throw a blanket over the teenager in the backseat, lock the truck, and hop out. There’s a twenty-four McDonald’s nearby; Jon heads over with everyone’s order and comes back with an armful of paper bags—yellow-wrapped burgers, packets of fries, four cokes and a water for the kid. They eat outside sitting at an umbrella-shrouded table, and take turns ordering more food inside.
They’re halfway through their meal when they begin to hear it: a thunk thunk thunk. Thunk thunk thunk.
It’s Peter Parker, he thinks, at last starting to wake up.
Another thunk thunk thunk, and then another, and Nick stands up with a mouthful of burger, shoves the last bit in his mouth, and dusts his greasy hands on his pants. “One sec,” he says, still chewing, and he walks to the truck, climbs into the back, and shuts the door behind him. The windows are tinted near-black, so they can’t see much, but when Nick comes back a few minutes later the thunking has stopped.
They eat fast, taking heaping bites of their burgers, and Haroun climbs into the backseat while the others are in the bathroom, carrying just the plastic-lidded cup of water with a straw. The kid’s laying on the floor of the truck entirely shrouded by that tarp. Haroun pulls it away and yanks him up by his hoodie, propping him up against the window. “Hey,” he says, patting the kid’s cheek a couple times. “Peter Parker. Peter. I brought you some, uh…” The kid’s not saying anything, and his closed eyes aren’t giving any signs of life. “Peter,” he says again, firmly, and this time he smacks the kid’s cheek, expecting him to blink his eyes open and glare at him or something.
But he doesn’t. His eyes are closed, his neck lolling back, and even as he jabs the straw at the kid’s mouth he doesn’t open up.
“Drink, Peter Parker,” Haroun says, frustrated, “come on, fucking drink.”
How strong is that fucking sedative? How much did Nick give him? Haroun tries again, stabbing the straw at his teeth, trying to pull at the kid’s chin so that he’ll fucking open, and his whole head tilts sideways, slack, and bangs hard into the car window.
“Fuck—hold on…”
This time, Haroun grabs the kid’s head at the base of his neck, holding it still with one hand. He uncaps the plastic lid and pours water into his mouth, but it doesn’t stay. Peter makes a gurgling sound and coughs out—water comes down his chin. Haroun pours a second spill of water into his mouth, saying, “Ah, shit…” His head comes up, some misplaced instinct, and his eyes flutter—water spills down his front, turning his tee shirt dark. He coughs again, and again, and then goes limp again, water still slipping down his slack chin.
A raspy gargling sound, like he’s choking, and Haroun whacks him on the back a couple times. “Jesus—fuck—“
Behind him, the car door opens. It’s Nick. His hands are greasy from the fries and he’s sarong down at Haroun with a mixture of annoyance and bewilderment. “Dude, what the hell? What are you…”
Nick scans the truck’s backseat: Haroun holding the cup of water and gripping the back of the kid’s head, halfway through the motion of helping him, and the man’s entire face hardens. “Really?”
Nick was mad.
“This isn’t a fucking hotel,” he spits, and when he reaches for Haroun’s cup, he jerks his hand back.
It all sets in for Haroun—the full cup of water in his hands, the way he’s kneeling awkwardly in the back of the truck, the way Peter Parker is completely slack on the truck floor. Through gritted teeth, he says, “How much did you give him?” As though in response, the kid groans and turns his head into the pleather car seat, now wet from spilt water and saliva.
Nick tosses the blanket back over the kid, and he seems to go still. “Enough,” he says coolly.
“He can barely fucking move!”
“He was waking—up!”
“Six hours in and we’re already overdosing him on fucking sedatives—we’re gonna bring Charlie a goddamn corpse if you keep it up, like, are you trying to kill him before we get there?”
“Are you trying to get caught?” Nick shoots back. Nick snatches the cup from him; water splashes onto the leather backseat. “Quit coddling him, Haroun. Kid’s enhanced—he can do without water for a couple hours.” He shoves the car door open again with his shoe and dumps the water out onto the asphalt.
The splash is dark, like blood.
After switching license plates again, they take the highway up through Massachusetts—from Northampton to Greenfield and then up towards the bottom corner of Vermont. There’s no cops out there, just mountains and forest, and Nick is impatient so he picks up the pace. His phone keeps ringing, and he keeps picking it up with one hand and steering the truck with the other, repeating, “Yes—yeah, Charlie, I said we’re almost there.”
The speed limit’s sixty-five, and they’re going eight then ninety, ninety-five then a hundred, speeding past trees and whipping past other cars at speeds that make Haroun’s stomach curdle. Nick slows down near the border, and picks up again as they’re going into Vermont.
They’re going ninety-two when red-and-blue lights flash behind them: police.
Haroun’s heart careens into his stomach. He feels a wave of fear wash over him through the narcotics he’s already got in his system, and he can’t think of a single genuine word to say.
“Nick?” Glenn says in a panicky tone, but Nick grips both hands with the wheel and slows down to a smooth seventy.
What can they do? They can’t hide him, not with all of them packed in this truck like sardines. They’ve got nowhere to put him, no way to explain what this teenager is doing half-unconscious in the backseat—
“Oh, fuck,” says Glenn, “fuck, man, we’re so done—we’re so fucking done—”
“Untie the kid,” Jon says sharply, and Haroun touches the dashboard. He’s not sure if they have registration. Or insurance? Do they have insurance? Did that government guy take care of that? He never even thought to ask, and now they’re gonna go to jail, they’re gonna be in jail for the rest of their lives—
“What?”
“I said untie the fucking kid—now, man, quick! Wake him up!”
Glenn makes quick work of the knots, while Jon reaches over and slaps the kid’s face; “Up and at ‘em, Peter,” he says. “Peter! Hey!”
The kid’s groggy, opening his mouth and closing it again, and his eyes flutter a little. He looks clammy, sweat shining on his pale forward, and the whites of his eyes roll again beneath their lids. Nick slows down a little more, bringing his speed down to fifty and then forty.
“We quadruple dosed him, man,” stammers Haroun, “I don’t think he’s gonna—”
Jon reaches over and rears his hand back, then cracks his hand across the kid’s face.
“Jesus, man!”
By now, the car is stopped, and the police lights grow bluer and brighter behind them. Jon grabs the kid by the collar, and shakes—the kid’s head bobbles back and forth. “Peter! Hey!” The kid pushes his head up, garbles something incoherent, saliva sliding down one corner of his mouth. Jon wipes the kid’s mouth with the hood, grabs him by the jaw, and grips his head hard with both hands, shaking with a force. “Peter! I need you awake! Now!”
The kid’s arms reach up to stop him, but barely graze Nick’s wrists before they drop limply to his slides. His wrists are raw, chafed from the rope, and Glenn yanks his sleeves down to cover it up. Jon pries the kid’s eyes open with his thumbs, lilt up and steady for a moment on Jon’s face. His pupils are extraordinarily dark.
“Be good,” Jon says, “or you’re dead, you understand?”
Haroun watches Peter Parker’s response: the kid mumbles half a word, his eyelids fighting to close against Jon’s fingers, his pupils rolling up and then down again.
They’re so completely, utterly fucked.
A figure approaches the truck window and raps a couple times, motioning for Nick to roll it down.
He has a flashlight in his hand and waves it over the front seat, then the back, and then the front again, blinding Haroun for a moment. “License and registration?” he says, which Nick has already in hand. He passes it through the open window, and the officer reads it and hands it back. “Where’re you coming from, Nathan?” he asks, shining his light again over Jon and lingering its glow on his bruised face.
That must be the name on his license—and the name on the car’s registration. Thank god for the government guy—he must’ve covered all their bases.
“Just from the mountains,” says Nick quickly. “Just took my brother up there for his birthday…” He’s good at this—lies slipping into truths slipping into lies again, rattling off about the Vermont mountains and Massachusetts taxes and somehow gets the officer nodding, too.
“And what happened to you?” says the officer, nodding to Jon’s brutalized face.
Jon grimaces. “Me and my buddy got in a little spat. Nothing serious.”
The officer passes the light over the backseat another time, and this time it stays on the half-conscious Peter. “Your brother okay?” he asks.
Haroun freezes—he’s sweating bullets now, heartbeat thunking loudly in his head.
“All good,” Nick says. “My little brother—we were celebrating and, well, he had a little too much, you know. Sorry. I was rushing him home—we’re trying to get back before the kid’s curfew.”
It’s a good lie. Better than anything Haroun could’ve come up with himself. It explains the speed, the late-night driving, and the clearly inebriated kid in the back. Haroun glances to see that Glenn is feigning drunk too, blinking slowly and waving at the officer. The cop asks Nick if he’s been drinking, to which Nick says no, of course not, and the officer nods in agreement. He doesn’t look drunk—and neither does Haroun, just Glenn and Peter in the backseat.
“What’s his name?” The cop asks Haroun, flashing his light into the car again.
“Pe—uh, Parker,” he stammers. “That’s Parker.”
The cop calls out his name a couple times and Peter mutters something slurred, nothing intelligible.
“Hey, kid,” Nick says, playing along. “Hey—Parker. Wake up, man. Say hey.”
Jon pats the kid hard on the side of the arm, then squeezes, and Peter Parker makes a groggy glance at the officer. “Hey…” Peter slurs, and his hands move a little.
At Jon’s request, Glenn does too, muttering something unintelligible to keep up the ruse, groaning a little and holding his hands to his stomach.
“See?” Nick says. “Told you.”
“Just wanted him to have a good birthday,” Jon adds, smiling and looking nearly genuine. “Hoping their dad won’t be too pissed.”
Nick rambles for a little about their so-called “dad,” making a couple nervous jokes about curfews and parents, to which the officer laughs a little and nods in affirmation. He makes an “everything okay?” nod at Haroun, the youngest of the group save Peter. “He’s all good,” Haroun adds.
The officer nods, and at last tucks his flashlight into his belt. “Alright. Well. I’ll let you off with a warning this time—for the kid, tell him happy birthday. Get him home safe, you hear? And get some water in him, too, he’ll thank you in the morning.”
“Will do,” says Nick with a nod. “Thank you, officer. Have a good night.”
“Thanks,” Jon adds, still with one hand clamped on Peter’s arm.
They sit in the car in silence as the police car flips its red-and-blue lights off and drives off. Haroun’s heart pounds wetly in his chest, and for a few more minutes the entire car is quiet. It’s over. It’s over.
“Ow,” murmurs Peter Parker, from where Jon is still gripping his arm tight, “...May, you’re… you’re… h’rting me…”
“Oh, shut up,” snaps Jon, and he shoves the blanket back over the kid’s head.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7
The rest of the ride is quick. A couple hours in the car, and then a long, humid trek from the truck to the bunker, Peter Parker slung limply over Jon’s shoulder.
By the time they make it inside, it’s almost two in the morning. Charlie’s not happy about the police stop, or about old May Parker, or about the fact that Peter’s drugged so heavily that he can scarcely speak. Haroun helps strap the kid down into this odd metal chair, and then he takes off into one of the rec rooms before Charlie can tell him to do something else. It’s not his job, he thinks, or his problem. He rifles through the government boxes for something good—he’s already itching for another hit.
His friend Elijah is far past gone, laying out on one of the bunk beds, and waves vaguely as he enters. He’s dressed in one of their uniforms, vest and all, and his eyes are pinkish red. “How was it?” he slurs, and Haroun wants to be as high as his friend. No, he wants worse. He wants to be so high it kills him—he wants to lose himself to it, to steep himself in it, drown himself in it. He keeps seeing that woman May on the back of his eyelids: her dark hair damp with blood, her seatbelt pulled tight across her chest. He wants to forget; he wants to be gone.
“Shitty,” Haroun answers. “Is there any more—”
In response, Elijah waves his thin hand again, and over by a table is an open box of plastic bags. He finds a sealed bag filled with pure white powder: heroin, and he can practically taste it already.
Haroun shakes out a good bit of it onto a table and lines it up as best he can with an old debit card, cutting it into shaky strips of powder. By the time it’s in him, he’s got himself sprawled on the floor staring up at the ceiling; he feels sleepy, wonderfully slow, like a child rocked by its mother—a thousand times better. He feels like an angel, like heaven above, like a superhero soaring through the clouds. Somewhere beside him, Charlie’s at the table, snorting up the rest of his dope. “...good day,” he hears Charlie say. “...a great day! Today is—it’s the start, the whole world… It’s ours! Mine! It’s mine!”
The man laughs, and Haroun’s much too high to respond. He laughs too, overwhelmingly happy, and god—who cares about Peter Parker? The entire universe is at their fingertips, swirling in the cement ceiling above him, burning in his nostrils, swimming in his veins, and Haroun needs nothing else.
The first week is bad.
Charlie takes up Mason’s hammer and smashes the kid’s kneecap with it. Haroun’s never heard anyone make a sound like that, and pretty much everyone in the crew gets high afterwards just so they don’t have to think about it.
Haroun thinks to himself as it happens: the kid’s never gonna walk again.
And then, a second later, the realization hits: why would he need to?
It’s not like they can let him go after this. Little Riri keeps saying it to everyone, repeating it to herself like a mantra.; “All Stark has to do,” she says to Haroun one day, “is make the weapon, right? And then we can let him go. Right?”
Haroun shrugs, a non-answer; he needs another hit. His head’s starting to ache, and he’s starting to sweat—moisture peaking at his head and the back of his neck, all the way down his back.
“That’s what Charlie says,” she says. I mean, that’s the whole point, right? We’re not trying to hurt anyone, we’re gonna let him go—”
Nick finally snaps, “Don’t be stupid.”
The girl looks up at him.
“Kid’s not going home,” Nick says. “He’s never gonna leave this place again.”
He’s right, Haroun thinks. No matter what Charlie tells Tony Stark, they’ll never let that Spider-kid go. Why would they? He’d spill all of their secrets to the cops, or to the feds, and they’d all get locked up for the rest of their lives. What good would that do?
Nick storms off, after that, snatching up a half-used bottle of blue-tinted pills and heading down the hallway. “That’s not true,” Riri says, turning to Haroun, “right? Charlie said…”
Haroun shrugs again. He’s not going to be the one to explain it to her. “It’s gonna be fine,” he promises. “Don’t worry.”
The kid can’t walk right after that. Even limping seems to knock the wind out of him. And any time Charlie mentions that knee, poor Parker starts to cry.
Haroun hates it.
He’s not sure how Charlie stomachs it. The screaming, the shouting, the bleeding and bruising and splintering bone. The screeching for help, the sobbing for them to stop, the begging for people who weren’t there, the HELP ME, MR. STARK, HELP!
Haroun gets so fucked up that week that he finds himself vomiting in the hallway—the whole world going hazy around him.
But at least then he doesn’t have to hear Parker scream.
TUESDAY, APRIL 10
Day four, and the kids make a run for it.
He wasn’t even there for it—apparently the kid stuck to the ceiling when they entered his cell around seven o’clock, and scampered out as soon as the door cracked open. Tried to spider-crawl all the way to the door, but Charlie gets him with the hammer a couple times, drags him back to the chair, and Mason beats him black and blue just for trying.
RJ overdoses two days later. Day six. They find him in the morning, sprawled cold in the hallway outside that red-starred cell doo. His hand is still clutched into that white baggie half-full of coke, eyes open and still watching it like he’s about to take another whiff.
Jon and Frank dig a hole a couple hundred feet from the bunker entrance and put him in it. He was nineteen—a year younger than Haroun, only a couple years older than Parker, and they’re putting him in the ground.
It’s RJ’s own fault, but Charlie blames the Parker kid. The man’s so pissed about it that he nearly kills Parker in the next session—lets that electric-head-thing run on him until the kid passes out in the chair, roaring all the while that it’s his fault. The kid’s trembling so badly when they lug him back to his cell that Haroun’s afraid they’ve done some real damage. He pats the kid’s face a couple times. “Hey, you good?”
Parker trembles again and blinks blearily at him, mumbles something incoherent.
“You’re fine,” Haroun says. “Snap out of it—you’re fine.”
“Fine,” Parker echoes, blinking slowly, and he mumbles something else. His pupils are wide and dark, and there’s a bruise on his cheekbone from the head mechanism. “Fine…”
Haroun’s not sure what exactly that machine’s meant for. But he knows, looking at the way Peter’s pupils sharpen and widen, the way his whole body trembles from it, the way he squints up at Haroun a little confused, that it’s probably not meant for teenagers.
For a second, he wonders what it feels like. He imagines himself sitting in that metal chair, metal clamped around his skull, flailing and shrieking and shivering violently.
Then he dashes the thought—Parker’s enhanced. He’s a mutant—some kind of spider-human hybrid freak. He’ll heal up just like he usually does.
SATURDAY, APRIL 14
Day eight, and the kids try to escape again, just a couple days after RJ’s death, so the whole crew’s too numbed by grief and drugs to even notice they were plotting again. Harouns’s not there for that one, either, but he hears all about it from Mason. Apparently, the kid stuck to the ceiling and strangled Mason with their braided up sheet; it’s so bad the man’s throat is encircled with bruises, and he suffers a bad cough for days later.
By the time Haroun gets there, the whole situation is a fucking mess. The Lang girl is cowering behind Peter’s good leg and bawling into Mason’s cell phone. The Parker kid’s got Mason’s gun in one hand and is poking frantically at the door’s keypad, pointing the barrel at Haroun and Renee and the rest of them, and glancing desperately between them and the keypad and back again.
Parker’s face is still purpled from the last time he ran, his nose still crooked from Glenn’s fist, his eyes still blackish and swollen. He looks all wrong as he waves the gun, like a creature crawled out from under someone’s bed. “Get back!” he cries, and his voice frays like violin wire. she looks frantic, and Haroun can see the withdrawal in him the way he can see it in himself sometimes, twitching in his fingers, aching at the back of his neck. “All of you, get back! I’m not going back in there!”
The kid tries to use it too but he’s too young and too stupid.
He didn’t even know he had to turn off the safety.
“I’m not going back in there!” the kid cries as Glenn grabs him by the neck and Renee snatches the useless gun out of his hands. “You’re not putting me back in there!”
Charlie tears the kid’s back open at eight am with his belt, just for trying to run. He shouts about his father the whole time, even as the kid apologizes and apologizes and apologizes. This isn’t just about keeping Parker in line—Charlie is pissed. He’s offended.
He beats the kid bloody and Renee gives the Lang girl a good scare, too, but nothing too vicious.
They’re not bad guys; they have standards.
When it’s over, Haroun finds Riri crying in the bathroom so many times that eventually he lugs her outside so they don’t have to hear anymore. “It’s gonna be good,” he says, although he’s not so sure who he’s convincing. “We’re doing something good here. We are.”
Riri nods shakily and wipes away her tears with her sleeve. “Can I have some?” she asks.
“Some…” Haroun trails off.
Riri nods her head at the plastic bag in his pockets. “Nah,” he says. “You’re too young.”
“How old were you when you started?”
“Seventeen,” he says.
“I’m almost seventeen—“
“No,” he chuckles, and the high makes it funnier, “you’re not.” She’s fifteen, younger than Parker, and he’s not about to fork over any of his stuff to a fucking kid.
“I can handle it,” she says, folding her arms.
He scoffs. “I’m not a bad guy, Riri. I’m not gonna offer drugs to a kid.”
“I’m not a—
“You are. You know what, why don’t I just walk down the hallway and let little Lang give it a try? Huh? What am I, Dr. Doom? Come on, man.”
She glares at him. “Charlie was younger than me when he started.”
“Charlie was a literal child when he started,” Haroun shoots back. The guy never shut up about it. “Dude—haven’t you heard him talk about it? This is his whole life—he’s been on it since he was like, nine.”
“Look,” he says, because he knows the truth. “Once you start, that’s it. Your life” —he waves vaguely around at themselves, at this shitty bunker room— “this is it. I just want…”
Then he looks at her a little too long and jealousy seeps in. She was so fucking lucky that she didn’t have this daily vice—so fucking lucky. She didn’t wake up every day itching for pills. Didn’t spend every waking second waiting for her next hit. She still had her whole life ahead of her. She still had a chance.
Something in him wanted to drag her down with him.
“Forget it,” he says, tossing the orange pill bottle onto the floor between them. “If you wanna ruin your life, be my guest.”
The kid heals quick—it’s one of his superpowers. By the next day, the wounds from Charlie’s belt are half-gone, melded into pink scars and yellowy bruises.
The next night, they waterboard him. Stark’s scream goes so shrill he’s incoherent. The kid kicks and thrashes the whole time but he doesn’t even bleed. Haroun doesn’t even think it’s that bad until they finally let him up and the kid’s shaking violently and his eyes are wide open and dazed—and he’s coughing and sputtering and gasping in a choked panic.
When they drag him to the cell, he’s still shaking like that, not saying a word, barely moving on his own. “You’re fine, Parker,” Haroun snaps. “It's just a little water.”
The boy looks up at him, his hair dripping wet, and he looks young, oddly, looking up like that with his hair sticking to his forehead. There's a red mark on his forehead from Charlie’s palm where he held him down.
The kid’s fine. It won’t bruise.
TUESDAY, APRIL 17
Sometime in the second week, one of the women is dead—a heroin addict, twenty-nine years old. Riri finds her in the morning, in the bathroom lying in a pool of her own vomit. Haroun didn’t even know her name. Gail, apparently, and she and Frank were friends. Cousins. Something like that.
The guys bury her outside; Haroun takes Riri to a nearby McDonald’s and tries to coax her into eating something. She just hugs herself and shakes her head.
She’s the second one dead, and they bury her far from RJ, just in case.
They don’t want it to look like a graveyard.
THURSDAY, APRIL 19
Two days later, the kids try to escape for the third time. They make shanks out of the plastic meal toys and take a couple of them as hostages: Frank and Zhiyuan. The little girl stabs Zhiyuan in the shoulders like seven times. Frank gets killed in the process—Renee shoots him clean through the neck and he bleeds out on the cell floor.
And when Parker inevitably gets caught, Charlie lays him flat on his stomach and whips his legs bloody. When the kid stops screaming, and his head tips into the table, and his eyes flutter closed, Charlie just keeps hitting him.
—and hitting him—
—and hitting him, until Haroun grabs him around the arm and hauls him backwards. The man’s arm is sticky with sweat and his face is spattered with blood spots and he’s smiling. “You’re gonna kill him! Charlie! Charlie!”
As Charlie snaps his arm back, Haroun makes a grab for the wire— “You’re gonna kill him!” and Charlie twists to free himself, whipping his arm to the side, and the wire catches Haroun sideways in the chest—ah!—and he yelps and falls backwards.
“That freak’s gonna FUCKING LEARN!” Charlie shouts, and he snaps the wire towards the ground—a crack!—and Haroun shrinks, shielding himself from another hit.
From the ground, he touches his hand gingerly to his chest—to the stinging blow, and he groans at the pain of it. It tore clean through his shirt and slashes straight across his torso. He’s bleeding, and it hurts bad enough that he winces again when he tries to move, and stays on the ground. His shirt dampens red.
But at least it got Charlie to stop.
The man drops the wire to the ground, grumbles about how useless they are, and storms out of the room, leaving Peter strapped to the table before them. Daria and Frank get to work moving him, and their hands slip over his bloodied back as they drag him away.
Haroun feels sick when he thinks about how many times Charlie hit Peter. Twenty times with that wire, maybe thirty, and Haroun got half a backwards hit and it hurts worse than anything he’s felt in years, his skin slashed in a straight line. Mateo stitches him up with some local anesthetic so he doesn’t feel much, and coats the wound in antiseptic and fresh bandaging so it doesn’t get infected. Haroun’s seen some infected wounds on the kids—the yellowed pus, the reddened edges, the skin hot to the touch. He doesn’t want that happening to him.
They take it easy on the kid for the next few days after that. Leave him in his cell mostly, take him in the chair a couple times just to scare Stark, but really Parker’s barely conscious enough to even register they’re there. Zhiyuan spends some time after that lying down and recovering from his stab wounds—they give him enough painkillers that he doesn’t feel much.
On the first night, he spots Ava coming out of their cell and shutting the door carefully behind her. He’s seen her doing this a lot—drifting in and out of the cell with something hidden in her hand. She’s always nice to them, nicer than Haroun would be to two slabs of dead meat. “They’ll be dead anyway,” he tells her as she passes him; he catches her wrist in his free hand, and she pauses.
“So will we,” she says, and she gives him a dopey, high smile. He pries open her hand to find a few empty syringes—unlabeled, but Haroun can take a decent guess as to what they are. Sedatives, opioids, the same shit that Ava loves to take herself. Judging from the smell (a little sour, like vinegar) it’s some kind of morphine.
He lets go of her wrist.
By the second day, Haroun’s still wincing whenever he moves from his wound, so he takes some more dope until everything is fuzzy and most of the pain is gone.
And on the third morning, when the rest of his friends are sleeping, he wakes early from the pain and wanders the bunker to try to ignore it. When he passes the kids’ cell, he can hear something strange. Sharp shallow huffs. Uneven pauses followed by short gasped inhales.
That’s pain. Haroun knows it well.
He opens the door and the little girl is already hidden far under the bed. Parker is face down in the middle of the cell floor and making those odd sounds. Two sharp inhales, strained pause, then huffed exhale. When Haroun touches him, the kid tenses but doesn’t make a move to get away from him.
Haroun supposes he’s too injured to even think about moving.
“Not gonna hurt you,” he says, kneeling down beside the kid. The lone lightbulb flickers above his head. “Just here to help you out.”
Peter Parker doesn’t respond. He's coated in sweat—reeks of it. Haroun’s not sure he’s even conscious. There’s some messy stitching here, white thread poking haphazardly through the skin of his back. like a child’s work. Haroun glances in horror, thinking suddenly of the Lang girl hiding beneath the bed. No way she would’ve—
Well, when he thinks about it, that might’ve been their only way to stop the bleeding if Parke couldn’t do it himself. It looks a little infected. The wounds are a little too pink, the scabs a little too soft. In the corner of the cell are some carefully folded black jumpsuits made of the same dark denim fabric that Haroun’s clothes are made of. He’s seen them stacked up in some of the bunker closets—probably made for whoever they used to put in that chair. Super soldiers. Prisoners.
(They come with matching boots, too, but he supposes Parker has no need for boots or for any shoes at all. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.)
He goes back to their drug stash and rifles through a few of the boxes until he finds the half-used case of supersoldier sedative. He snatches up a few syringes and heads back for the cell; he doesn’t stab it into the kid’s neck this time. He finds a decent vein in Peter’s foot, one they haven’t used yet, and gives him a good healthy dose, injecting the first syringe and then the second.
Peter makes a small groan, and his hands loosen from the tense fists. The creases in his face soften, soften, soften.
When the kid’s out cold, Haroun puts some blue-plastic gloves on and disinfects. He uses what Mateo used on him: some wound glue, some disinfectant, some topical antibiotic, and dabs away at Peter's legs before carefully closing the wounds with slow, cautious stitches. His mom taught him how to sew when he was younger—how to put patches on his jeans and close up the holes in the worn elbows of his shirts. It’s the same, almost.
When he’s done, his hands are crusted with blood. It’s all under his fingernails. Haroun spends some time in the bathroom scrubbing it out. and he runs the water until his hands are pink.
Then he gets high.
He finds a spot at the back of his arm by his elbow that seems pretty good and injects there. A little heroin first, and then he finds the extra dose of super soldier sedative in his pocket and uses a bit of that too, just a little, just enough to take away some of his pain. The high finds him fast, a wonderful heavy feeling, and he can feel the creases in his own face go soft, his own fisted hands go limp, can feel the stinging in his own chest fade away.
THURSDAY, APRIL 26
One of the graves gets found—Gail’s—by some hikers coming down the mountain. It’s all over the news: Jane Doe found in the White Mountains. Police have determined no evidence of foul play in her death. If you believe you know this woman, please contact…
A sketched reconstruction of her face gets put out on all the news channels, but no one comes forward to claim her and no one seems to recognize her. Haroun didn’t think anyone would; Frank was the only family she had, and he’s dead too. Besides, the reconstruction’s pretty shitty.
Government guy pitches a fit about it—Charlie’s on the phone with him for like half a day trying to figure out what to do next. After that, they dig up the other two graves. They take RJ’s body, wrap it up and weigh them down with stones, toss him in the nearest lake they can find. To Frank’s, they take him back to New York City, toss him in a dumpster in a pretty shitty part of the Bronx, and leave him there.
They don’t want to take any chances on their graves getting stumbled upon again.
From then on, they’re instructed, either drop them in a lake somewhere or take them into a city and drop them there. No more burying their bodies on the mountain.
It’s strange, Haroun thinks, that the government guy thinks there will be more bodies to bury. These were all accidents, Haroun knows, just flukes. Gail and RJ didn’t know how to hold their shit, and Frank—that was Renee’s fault. No one else is going to die—no one else is going to be dropped in a lake or hauled into a dumpster or buried underground.
They aren't going to lose anyone else.
Sometime in the third week, when Renee’s taken a knife to the kid’s face, the kid starts screaming, “May! May! May!”
That’s what he’d screamed in the car. That was the woman he was driving with. May Parker, the woman with curly dark hair and a flowery pink shirt dotted with blood. Hanging upside down in her crushed car, bleeding slowly from her head and thigh.
He remembers it so clearly.
She’s dead now, though, so he hates that he’s still thinking of her. This was stupid, she was dead. She didn’t know where they were, couldn’t rescue Peter, couldn’t lead anyone all the way to Vermont and screw up the mission.
Right?
God, he should’ve killed her when he had the chance. Then he wouldn’t be thinking about this all the time.
He finds the police report first. It’s public record, being a traffic accident report, and so is all of May Parker’s information.
VEHICLE #1 STRUCK TRAVELING WESTBOUND. VEHICLE #2 (UNKNOWN) HIT VEHICLE #1 ON LEFT SIDE AND FLED FROM SCENE…
He scans the page for the victim’s information.
VICTIM #1: FORTY-YEAR-OLD FEMALE PULLED FROM VEHICLE #1. PARAMEDICS ARRIVED ON SCENE, VICTIM UNCONSCIOUS UPON ARRIVAL. VICTIM #1 ENDURED BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA TO THE FRONT OF THE HEAD AND SEVERAL LACERATIONS TO THE LOWER THIGH. TAKEN TO MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL FOR FURTHER TREATMENT…
She was found alive on scene. Unconscious, but alive.
She was alive.
Shit, he thinks, shit shit shit. “Nick,” Haroun says, “can I borrow the truck?”
“Hm?” Nick’s eyes roll groggily in his skull.
“Keys, man, the fucking keys!”
“Oh…” he waves his hand, “uh… Charlie…”
Right, Charlie took charge of the car keys a week or two ago, after yet another angry phone call from that government guy. Charlie’s plastered by the time Haroun reaches him, so he rifles through the man’s pockets, takes the key, and heads out down the mountain alone.
The trip takes around seven hours, although he does have to stop once for gas. He knows Charlie and Renee will be on his ass when he gets back but he doesn’t care. He has to know if that woman’s still alive.
By the time he gets into New York City, traffic worsens. He parks as close to the hospital as he can and walks the rest of the way, wandering inside. He asks the receptionist at the front for a “Jane Doe” but she’s the only one behind the desk, and so frazzled that he has to ask her nearly five times before she types the name into her computer and shakes her head. “Sorry, sir,” she says. “Unless you’re family—”
“I am,” he blurts out. He doesn’t dare say her name aloud. “I think I know her.”
She hesitates, and then says. “Alright, sir…” She taps away at her keyboards, reads the screen, and says, “Room 317—up the escalator, and take the elevator on the right.”
Haroun barely has time to thank her before she’s moved on to the next person.
He heads up the escalator and up an elevator to the third floor, heading down the hall.
In the hospital room, there lies the dark-haired woman he remembers, dressed in a white hospital gown. There’s a boy at her bedside, heavy and brown-skinned with a shake of black hair. He is sad and young and Haroun can’t bear to look at him for more than a couple seconds. He’s reading a book to her, he notices, and he doesn’t stop even to look up at the nurse or at Haroun in the doorway.
A nurse is by her bedside, hanging a bag of fluid beside her. She has shaggy green hair and both her eyebrows pierced, and she speaks to the boy in the chair for a couple seconds before patting her hand on his back, packing up her supplies and walking out. As she does, the nurse spots him.
“Sorry,” he says quickly, and the boy at May Parker’s side doesn’t even look up. “Who’s, uh…”
The nurse gives a reluctant sigh. “Jane Doe,” she says. “Major brain damage—doubt she’ll ever wake up. Miracles with things like this, you know.”
“Oh,” he says, and relief washes over him. Not dead, maybe, but practically dead. Not his problem anymore—not Charlie’s problem either. Maybe she’d die on her own, or she’d stay like this forever, a rotting vegetable.
He’s safe. They’re all safe. May Parker isn’t something they have to worry about anymore.
“You know her?” the nurse asks, suddenly examining his face. “She could use the compa—”
“No,” Haroun adds, already backing up. “Sorry. My bad.”
The nurse gives him an odd look and opens her mouth to say something else, but Haroun turns on his heel and goes.
All the way home, Haroun tries not to think about May Parker the Jane Doe, about the kid crying at her bedside, about the green-haired nurse asking him if he knew her.
Yeah, I know her, he could’ve said. I’m the one who nearly killed her.
Haroun tries generally not to think so much about the lives he’s affected—of those kids on Peter Parker’s home screen waiting for him to come back to school. Of that little girl’s parents returning to an empty pink painted bedroom. Of Scott Lang and his daughter’s missing posters still plastered all over New York. Of Pepper Potts, even, coming home to an empty bed.
He’s not in charge, Haroun thinks. It’s not his fault. He’s not the one who picked Peter Parker over Pepper Potts. He’s not the one who came up with this plan or agreed to work with some government guy to save the world. That was Charlie, all Charlie.
He gets drunk when he gets back with Zhiyuan and Jon—he’s so messed up that by nightfall the bunker ceiling is swirling above him, and he forgets about the Jane Doe at all. He takes some oxy, too, opened up from a fresh box, cuts it open with one of those black-handled bunker knives. “Government shit,” Jon says, licking his teeth. “God—so fucking good.”
He’s right. It’s better than anything they ever had on the streets, none of it diluted or laced or half used up. It’s clean. It’s perfect. It’s theirs. Sure, it’s government shit that killed RJ—that killed Gail and Riri’s brother and nearly killed Haroun, too, but he itches for it, so he grabs some anyway. He lines it up nicely on one of the bunker beds, snorts it up, and sighs at the sudden burn in his nose. It stings, and he sniffs, rubbing at his nose to get the last of it into his system.
But god, it’s good.
That night, he skips out on Parker’s session and goes out into the mountains. The grass is nice like this, damp from the warmth of the day, and it’s pitch-black enough that he can barely distinguish the trees from the sky above him. He's drunk enough that he’s forgotten all about that May Parker lying in her hospital bed. The one mistake he made. This isn’t too bad, right? They shake up the kid once a day, they get their fix, some guy in a government office makes a few bucks and gets a weapon. Haroun doesn’t know the specifics, and he doesn’t really care. Whatever gets him what he needs.
The sky looks nice like this.
He thinks, from above the bunker, from beyond those bunker walls, he might be able to hear someone screaming.
But who knows, right?
And who cares?
For now, Haroun is higher than the bunker—higher than Parker and the Lang girl locked in that cell, higher than the heavy bunker lid, higher than the mountains and the pine trees and the deer and the dirt and the fucking stars above.
So Parker will survive another day—and Haroun?
Haroun doesn’t care.