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He can’t seem to move or even to think. He just sits there, on the curb, out of the way of the firemen and EMTs and cops and FBI agents… just out of the way. He sits there, with his hands in his lap, staring at the smoking wreck of the police van.
The van Jack just died in.
“Mac?”
A soft voice. An inquiry. Thornton, crouching down in front of him. When he doesn’t look at her, she reaches out and kindly touches his face, turning his head her way. He allows it. He feels boneless, lifeless. Shock. He’s in shock, he knows. He doesn’t care.
Because Jack is dead.
When he finally does look at Thornton, she pulls her hand away. Her fingertips are red, sticky with his blood. He’s bleeding, cut and scraped and bruised all over, he knows that, too. He doesn’t care about that either. It doesn’t even hurt. He’s too numb to hurt.
“What happened there, Mac?” Thornton asks gently.
He knows that she doesn’t want to be asking this. Especially not right now. But it’s either her or the official looking people in the back, staring their way glumly. Because he was supposed to have disarmed the bomb. And yet, it went off.
And it killed Jack.
“Talk to me, please,” Thornton pleads with him, pale and red-eyed and shaken, too. Jack was her friend, too. She was there, too.
He swallows. “I disarmed the bombs. I did. Both triggers,” he replies hoarsely and his eyes slide back towards the wreck; it’s still smoking.
“Then how–”
“He must’ve used a manual trigger,” he explains. “He was watching us - me. He was watching me. From somewhere. And when he saw me disarm the bombs…” He trails off.
“He set them off manually,” Thornton finishes for him quietly.
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t nod. He just continues staring at the van. Inside which Jack was standing when the bombs went off. He was thrown back, across the street, flipped over the cop car, he hit the pavement hard… but he survived.
Jack died in there. Gone in the split of a second. It’s his only consolation, that Jack didn’t feel anything, that he didn’t even realize what was happening. Still.
Jack’s gone.
Whatever happens here, it’s not your fault. Okay? It was never your fault…
It was never your fault…
It doesn’t feel that way.
Slowly, he picks himself up, gasping as the sharp, burning pain in his chest and his knee and his ankle and his shoulder finally filters in through the fog filling his mind. He doesn’t pay it any mind. Physical pain’s good. It’s there to distract him from the hollowness in his chest.
With one last glance at the smoking ruin of the van, he turns around and starts limping away, ignoring Thornton’s questions, first asked, then shouted after him as he moves farther and farther away from her.
Then there’re footsteps behind him, running footsteps. And…
“Where are you going?”
Riley. Riley with her red-rimmed eyes and wet cheeks and runny nose and her backpack clutched to her chest like a talisman.
He glances at her. “I’m going after The Ghost,” he replies as if it were really that simple.
In his mind it is. The Ghost killed Jack. He will get The Ghost. That simple. It is.
She continues walking beside him for a while, quiet, contemplative. Then, “Mind if I join you?” A serious question, asked with resolve. She means it.
He shakes his head. “Not at all.”
Jack’s dead.
They won’t let The Ghost get away with it.