When Jack came to, he was in a room he didn't recognise. It felt like his arms and legs were bound up and tied against his side. He began to struggle from side to side and kick at the bindings. The noise brought a couple of people to the door. Andy and Jane were standing there.
'Alright, take it easy lad,' Andy said. 'You made it home.'
'You can have this room to yourself while you recover. Don't you recognise it?' Jane said.
Jack took a look around the room, squinting through his aching eyes. 'No, I don't remember,' he said through numb, split lips. It seemed to be a child's bedroom, a boy's if he had to guess.
He wasn't tied up, it was just that he panicked because the sheet was tucked in so tight.
Jack laid his head back down on the pillow and massaged his temples. The space between the fingers of his right hand hummed with a dull pain, and so did pinpoints down his left thigh, hip and shoulder, welts and abrasions along his knees, ankle, palms, ribs, neck, head…
'I hurt my hand on some railings,' Jack said. It was still the one that bothered him the most.
'So that's how you did it, we were wondering about that one. How did you manage to bandage it yourself? One handed at that,' asked Andy.
'What do you mean? I don't remember it being bandaged.' Jack tried to shield his eyes from the dim light through the room's curtains. The time that had passed seemed like a mad whirl of hurt, insanity and delirium. Those were only the parts he could remember.
There was a tense knot in his chest as his heart twitched and gave uncomfortable palpitations from the withdrawal, and it was an effort to suck air in between his teeth.
Had he done something bad? Or really, really bad? Jack was pretty sure he had. Several things, if he had to guess. Every vague detail that flashed back in to his memory was filled with regret that made him want to curl up and disappear rather than look the others in the eye. Judging from their expressions, Andy and Jane didn't seem too impressed.
'My memory's pretty vague right now, I think some people stopped to help. I have no idea who,' Jack said.
'You'll need it swabbing out, stitched, and re-dressed though,' said Andy. 'And all the other ones seen to as well. What the hell happened to you? Where did you go?'
Where could he even begin?
Jack noticed he wasn't covered in the muck and grime of the day before. There were so many bumps, bruises and scrapes, but under the sheets, the larger part of all the dirt and filth had been swabbed off, and the marks on his skin had now been revealed. He was wearing a clean t-shirt and underwear.
'Matt, Jane and I gave you a bath,' said Andy.
'You did what now?' They all saw him naked? Even Jane?
'Yeah, Sarah and Katie popped in to lend a hand and see what was going on. Emma came to help too with getting you into bed. Nothing we haven't seen before.' Andy said. 'Well…'
Jack put his good hand back over his eyes. It couldn't get any worse.
Jack summoned the courage to ask the burning question at the back of his mind. 'What happens next? Are you gonna decide what to do with me, or kick me out? I kind of got the feeling I'm not wanted.' Even saying that brought a painful stab from the memories of what the others had said to him.
How bad was his humiliation, how unforgivable? Jack supposed they would hold some kind of trial for him, read out his long list of sins, oblivious, intentional, deliberate, remembered or not. Those would only be the things they knew about. Surely they would exile him from the group? Maybe worse. Perhaps they might do him in.
'What are you talking about? No, I don't think we'd do that. We're not monsters,' Jane said, and she looked a little uncomfortable at the question.
'What happened last night got out of hand. It shouldn't have happened. What you did though by flipping out and going off was bloody stupid, though. I never want to see that again. We'll draw a line under it and move on.' Andy didn't have much else to say other than that. He seemed contemptuous maybe? Disappointed? It was hard for Jack to tell. There were so many questions. Andy held a cup of water to his mouth to seal any further ones.
Later in the day, Andy resumed tending to Jack's various injuries with Jane's help. Jack told them the basic story of all that had happened and where he'd got to. He showed them the necklace he'd got from the church. It felt good to rub it between his thumb and fingers to distract him as his injuries were picked at, cleaned and dressed.
Andy ran a pencil over the skin on Jack's fingers. 'Are there any areas that feel completely numb? If so, then it would mean the nerves in your hand are damaged. To fix that would be beyond my capabilities, you would need a plastic surgeon for that,' he said.
'No way, I was unlucky enough that this happened, never mind getting plastic surgery. What do I need, a facelift?' Jack said. 'Don't answer that.'
'I feel so stupid. It was one moment's bad decision. I thought the top of the railing wouldn't be so sharp and would be a good place to put my hand. It didn't look like anything more than a pointy decoration,' Jack said. 'I would probably make the same mistake while sober.'
Jack yelped out in pain. It was sheer agony as Andy swabbed the wound out with disinfectant. Andy told Jack to hold on to the bed post and not move or let go, no matter what, or he would get Matt in to hold his arm down for him. Jack made sure that he clung on tight. Andy soaked a piece of sponge in some brown liquid then rubbed inside the injury. Did he really have to rub it in every crack and crevice like that? Jack wondered as he groaned out loud. He felt it scouring around the inside of his hand. He writhed and twisted on the bed, but he didn't let go.
'It's best to do it quickly and thoroughly so we can get it out the way,' said Andy, although he was none too delicate about it. Jack thought that may have been deliberate. Fixing up the wound was more painful than getting it in the first place.
'So this is the result of my dramatic exit. How embarrassing,' remarked Jack, pale and trembling.
After that, he had to wait and endure Andy plucking out a couple of bits from inside the wound, fragments of dirt and even a little pink nodule of stray flesh before he stabbed through the remaining poor, tortured skin with a needle and drew it together with thread.
Andy's hands wavered and shook as he did the stitching, but the end result was a neat set of twenty-three stitches that held Jack's hand together, branching out in a jagged X-shape from between his index and middle finger, up between them, and beneath their base at the palm. Jack got a look at it before Andy bound it up in gauze, nice and tight.
Andy then had to repeat the procedure in miniature for all the little wounds peppered down his side. There were far more than Jack thought. Each had made a purple, yellow, blackish, bluish bruise around where they lay.
Some hadn't broken the skin but many had. The fun part was when Andy had to open the wounds up and dig around inside for the bits under the surface, some of which were very elusive, stubborn to come out, or couldn't be found. Andy pulled a strange face when Jack said they were bits of lead shot.
The rest of Jack's convalescence was mostly spent in this room. He had time in plenty to think about himself and others and the relationships between them. What did he really want from life, if he was unhappy where he was right now? What kind of person did he want to be, if he needed to change his ways?
He remembered that strange moment of revelation in the church, his epiphany, where the anguish dropped from him in the one moment of profound peace he could remember. Try as he might, he couldn't feel it as profoundly as he had done then. Jack cast his mind back and tried to remember all he could. He wished he could retain how he felt then and carry it with him always. If that was a valuable lesson, he wanted to learn from it, remember it always and keep it. He didn't tell anyone. How could he? Jack thumbed the crucifix to try to remind himself.
This. At least this could be one good thing he could take away from all this sorry mess.
Jane brought him a small tub of Balti that he ate cold with a fork that had probably only been used once or twice before, and it was the best thing ever. Jack felt so grateful to be back home and to eat good home-cooked food. It was a simple pleasure, and right now it was all he wanted. He could be content here and he was relieved to be home. This was something he could be happy with, as right now life seemed so precious.
It was awkward to train himself to use his left hand for everything, but he got by. His right hand itched under the bandages, right in the unreachable gap between the fingers where the stitches prickled.
He got the occasional visit from Joe and they sat and talked for a while. Joe brought him something to drink and some reading material to help him pass the time. Once or twice Jack ventured out and played cards with the others. They kept conversation light and pleasant.
He didn't know it, but the others had had a stern talking to by one member of the group, who'd said they'd gone way too far. What had happened was almost tantamount to bullying. Jack had his faults but he was oblivious. He didn't know what he was doing or how he came across. The others scoffed, but nevertheless they stopped.
Most times, Jack sat in the room by himself, where he drank and smoked and thought about his situation, when he wasn't dozing or watching the steady rise of the sun as it blazed optimistically at its peak, then sank past the horizon to sleep.
Jack felt his recovery was like being back in a chrysalis state, and this child's room was his cocoon. Here, he stayed hermetically sealed as he healed and grew until he could re-emerge back into the wider world. While he felt weak, feeble, and quite helpless with one hand bound up, it was good. He was cleansed of his sins and determined to make amends. No wonder his old life had gone so badly. Now he wanted a fresh start and to reach out to all the different, wonderful people in the world and get to know them better. Jack would be known as someone kind and benign, and would do good in the world, to be a positive and better person. He vowed to no longer be a fool or to do wrong.
Jack sat on his bed, tortoise-shelled in his duvet. He sipped at a bottle of lemonade with just a little dash of vodka puffed the dog-end of a spliff and let ash fall where it may. Matt popped by to pay him a visit.
'Hello Matt,' Jack said, and smiled beatifically.
'You're such a stupid prick. What if everyone was as irresponsible as you?' Matt replied. 'Now you can't do anything to help because your hands are bandaged and you need everyone to look after you like a baby.'
'I-I'm sorry. I said I was sorry. It was a one-off mistake, and one that will never be repeated,' Jack stammered.
'Well while you're sat here feeling sorry for yourself, everyone else is doing things to help. While you're off being a complete idiot, nearly dying, everyone else is making themselves useful. You've got a whole backlog of things to do to make up. You can't just play have-a-go hero by yourself! At night! It doesn't matter if you killed a whole bunch of them by yourself – how many?'
'A dozen, maybe,' Jack said.
'A dozen by yourself, and then you find other people out there and get shot and then come back with some bumps and scratches, apart from what you did to your hand. You should've been here to play your part.
'You can't be going off and worrying everyone like that. We thought you'd died. We've all seen enough of our friends dying or leaving us without people splitting off by themselves like that and doing themselves in.' Matt stared Jack down.
'I fully look forward to joining back in and helping out with whatever I can do when I'm able. I'm right handed, and I can't move my hand because of how tightly Andy's bound it, but you know me, I always offer to help out…' Words flowed out of Jack all at once.
'You're an inconsiderate dickhead.' Matt slammed the door and left him in peace.
The bedroom was filled with a strange nostalgia for Jack. It had been left in a lived-in condition by the family who'd disappeared. Jack hoped they were okay and had got somewhere safe and wondered where that could be.
It was an interesting puzzle to figure out what kind of person had once lived there. It was a boy's room, certainly. The colour scheme was mostly cream and pastel blue. Jack guessed the child was aged four to six, based on the clothes stuffed into the drawers and cupboards and the toys scattered around the floor and bed.
The books were certainly for a younger reader, full of bright pictures and not too many words. A couple in particular caught his eye. One was about a cartoon witch, a cat and an owl, and the other was about a boy who got sent to his room and retreated into a fantasy land filled with monsters who became his make-believe friends.
'No way,' Jack said, and he snatched them up to hold them to the light. He used to have these exact same books, in another age, in another lifetime so long ago now that it might have happened to another person. His eyes drank in every detail. Old memories came rising up out of the deepest places in his mind – incomplete, buried, ghostlike.
'I'd completely forgotten,' Jack murmured as his eyes prickled. When he opened the cover of one there was a handwritten message: 'To our dearest Harry, Happy Birthday, with all our love always, Mum and Dad.'
Harry. Now he finally knew the name of the vanished child whose room he borrowed and whose bed he slept in. Jack thought he could sometimes still detect the faintest trace of a boyish scent from the bedclothes.
Jack sat and hugged his knees. Memories of his own childhood, vague half-memories of the sunny, bright, golden-haired child, always smiling, spun past. How did it all go so wrong? Jack ran the grimy, long-nailed fingers of his bandaged hand over the smooth surface of the book cover and the happy colourful pictures. He looked at the disparity between them and the bloody, dead-skinned claw that had become his own and was once again struck by the guilt of how much of a fool he had become.
Joe brought him a collection of short stories. One in particular was about a character that was written into a story it didn't want to be in and didn't want to be the character it was written to be. It hit pretty close to home somehow.
Jack wondered who would record the history of all that happened in recent times, and who would be around to write their story? The group certainly had their own unique spin on things. Who would be the one who recorded their experience for any future readers, if not him? None of the others in the group had any interest in history, reading or even any claims to literacy that he was aware of. Jack thought of Samuel Pepys and his diaries, and how they'd made him famous for the invaluable historical artefacts they became.
In some perverse twist of fate, the events of recent days had given him an opportunity to say his piece. His good hand was bandaged and the fingers inflexible, but he was provided for by the others and had all the time in the world to write, or at least as long as it took for his wounds to heal. He was gifted with enough time and solitary confinement, lonely as it was, to write his testimony and maybe become a part of history.
Of course, there was the question of who would be around to read it. They would have only his original copy to read, and have to decipher his handwriting, but that was a different problem. As for referring to the world around him and the time before all this happened, should he use the present tense or the past?
His injury on his hand and the pockmarks from the pellets down his leg prickled and itched. Hours later, he was distracted by how a scab came away easily from his fingertips and the fresh skin underneath was pink and shiny. Jack set down his pen. His historical testament hadn't quite turned out the way he imagined. The end result of his musings were a few scrunched up sheets of A4 and an incomplete manuscript with many crossing outs and scribblings. He could finish it later.
He felt worn out after the session. He lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling while the sun set. It was strange; the new skin under his scab had started to heal over so quickly. He felt far better now he'd rested and got some meals in him. There was one sleep he fell into that must have lasted the better part of twenty-four hours. He was so exhausted that he just felt it come over him like the black depths of a coma, unstoppable and numbing even as he tried to stave it off with some Bhuna.
The door opened and Nick looked in.
'Alright there, Captain Survivor Man?' Nick said. The sight of Nick tested Jack's new-found virtue of forgiveness. He felt the memory bubble up of all Nick had said and done and he couldn't look him in the eye.
'Nope, not really,' Jack replied. He held up his bandaged hand and Nick grinned.
'So, you thought you would go gallivanting out, take on the whole world by yourself, recapture the town, get shot at, slay dozens of the creeps and leave us poor folks here…?' Nick said.
Jack groaned at the memories, though he couldn't help but smile. How embarrassing. At least Nick seemed to take it in good humour and wasn't here to torment him.
'Oh, don't you have a go as well. I've already been yelled at by Matt. One bugger-up, one yelling,' Jack mumbled.
'I haven't come here to shout. I didn't know you had it in you. Trying to outshine me were you? I only got one of them when I went out by myself – you made a valiant effort. I'm impressed. You showed courage.'
'Seriously? I went off on a shameful tantrum. Are you here to wind me up?'
Nick grinned. 'Well, are you going to invite me in or what? Honestly, some people have no manners these days.'
Jack gestured towards a chair and Nick came in and sat down. He kicked the door shut and Jack let him take a swig from his bottle.
'Look, I said and did some things that I'm not proud of. I've treated you wrong and I shouldn't have. I want to make my apologies. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that stuff and I didn't mean it. You're a good guy really. You mean well.'
Jack was surprised to hear Nick apologise. He never would have expected that. For a moment he was quite taken aback and stammered for words.
'Gosh, wow, well… alright. It's alright. I want to make amends and make it up to everyone,' Jack said, smiling and laughing a little. Nick smiled back at him.
'Well, not many people have the guts to go out there and try to make it on their own,' Nick said, still smiling. 'You got pretty far, right to the town centre from what I heard. You took on loads of them yourself at night-time, made contact with some other people we've never met before, got shot at, spent the night in a church then came all the way back by yourself and saved Matt, Emma, Joe and Andy as they went out for water.'
'They were out fetching water? They weren't looking for me?'
'Er, well, they said they might find you while they did. I mean, you could have been anywhere.'
Wow, no one had even looked for him. To be honest, what would he have done if they had found him? He didn't want to be found and would maybe have even turned on them if they did. Still, they didn't even try. 'Yeah, that's… probably right,' was all he said.
'Here, look, you must have an interesting story to tell. Tell me, what's it like that far in town, where did you get to, what did you do? I want to know every detail,' Nick said. He rested his elbows on the back of the chair and made it clear Jack had his full attention.
'Well, the town's a real state. Nature's taking back over and the place is getting overgrown so quickly. Weeds are growing all over the streets and sprouting in every corner and in the debris and rubbish all over. There's so much of it, all the junk and the mess. It's blown around and heaped everywhere, and there are so many bodies and bones. Not just people, but crows, rats, dogs, cats strewn all over the place. The crows and rats are the ones who really own the town. I even saw them pick on the Dead.
'There was one thing I can't explain,' said Jack. 'When I was over by Greenhead Park I met a group of people. Living people. I went over and said hello, then they took one look at me and started shooting. It was so weird. I'd never clapped eyes on them before but it was like they recognised me and were immediately hostile.'
'How weird,' said Nick. 'So which was this church you stayed at?'
'They said something…' Jack closed his eyes and tried to delve back into his memory. '"Murderer" they said. "It's one of them" or something. They shouted names like "scumbag" or "sick bastard". I don't get it.'
'Well, that's very strange. Have you told anyone else about that?' Nick asked him. 'How about we just keep that bit to ourselves? I don't think people need to hear things like that, or how you got shot at. It won't do them any good to hear that there's crazy people with guns out there.'
'I think people should be warned. We don't want them to get a nasty surprise if we bump into them again,' Jack said.
'No. There's no need to cause alarm. We don't want to panic them.'
'But people should be aware that they might get shot at…'
'Listen! I'm telling you now! Don't tell anyone!' Nick shouted and took Jack by surprise.
'Okay then, I won't. But why—'
'Promise.'
'Fine, I promise. Why would they do that, though? Did they think we were the psychos that ol' Charlie told us about?'
'Hey! Listen, Jack! Maybe they were the psychos. You think about that? They shot at you, didn't they? Just don't tell anyone,' Nick told him.
Jack mumbled 'Alright' and kept quiet. He was confused.
Nick seemed to choose his words carefully. 'Look, we need some people who are willing to get out there and make a difference. You certainly proved you're willing and capable of doing that. How about we get out there sometime, you and me? We'll go out there, do things and make a difference and bring home a big win. We'll make people see the light. You can bring Joe along too. The more the merrier.'
Jack said that sounded okay. He didn't quite know what to make of this.
'Can you drive?'
'No.'
'I'll teach you, but first, get some rest, okay?' Nick said.
Well, that was very generous. How could he say no?