Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

PROLOGUE

It would be a long while before Jack stopped marveling at time passing. One week ago , he’d think, this was all different. There were people here just wandering around. Sitting on benches. Buying birthday presents. In these early days he’d trace his fingertips through the dust on the banisters, tune the short-wave radio, eat creamed corn. In those first weeks he’d write down the names of school friends, even enemies, descriptions of their parents’ haircuts and clothes. He wrote down everything he could remember about Mel, whom he adored but who treated him like a pet. And he’d think, one week ago.

Two weeks ago.

A month ago.

Two months ago.

It would be a long while before it stopped feeling surreal. The way something was the way it was, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. A kind of regret would overwhelm Jack in these moments--the best way he could articulate it was the feeling, when carrying an overladen bowl of cereal up the stairs, an open bag of chips pinched between thumb and bowl, utensils balanced along the arm, where a sudden trip might occur. For a moment, amidst milk dripping down stair steps and shattered doritos littering the ground, one refuses to live in the reality of that moment, thinking, this could have so easily not have happened .

He lingered at home as long as he could. There was a childlike hope each morning that when he woke up, he might find it was all a dream. Only when his brothers’ rooms started to stink did Jack pack everything of value in the house--computers, radios, manuals and handbooks, as well as every battery he could salvage--and struck out for the mall. His father’s keyring, passed to Jack in those last days of relative health, clutched in his hand, sweat loosening his grip on the steel whistle attached to them. If he was picked up by one of the gangs that were forming everywhere maybe he could blow their eardrums out.

It took several trips, stashing backpacks of electronics and clothes and whatever food he figured wouldn’t rot, returning for them under cover of nightfall. The mall was shockingly secure--as Jack knelt and turned the key to the collapsing security grate he uttered a silent thanks for his father, who had walked the four miles himself into the city to close them the night their TVs and internet router stopped working. Things still displayed evidence of verge-of-collapse panic--graffiti, overturned shelves, minor looting--but Jack figured that before the gates had been closed the gangs and layabouts that had swept through here were still laboring, as he was, under the impression that this situation was temporary.

Jack still felt sick when he recalled, early on, his excitement when his brother told him through a coughing fit that school was closed for the third day in a row.

“No teachers well enough,” Duncan said, peering into a recently empty bottle of ibuprofen. “This flu going around is something else.”

“Seems like a good time to take over the school,” Jack quipped. “No more teacher’s dirty looks?”

His brother had pushed the side of his head affectionately. The next day, Duncan was too weak to stand.

In those first few months, Jack could hardly stand to be in the mall, remembering with every turned corner the way it looked with all the lights on, with mothers holding toddlers and squabbling with their in-laws over the merits of buying a discman or a portable radio. He’d spent a good amount of time at his dad’s desk in the security office, flipping through the cameras on the monitor, trying to catch someone picking their nose or shoplifting. Now the computer was dark, the cameras motionless.

Instead, Jack would unlock and slip under the grates, raised just enough for someone small to wiggle through, storing the key in his sock as he ventured out into the city. A few times he went back to his neighborhood and knocked on his old friend’s doors. He even peered through the windows of Mel’s house. It seemed like too much of a trespass to go inside any of these places, though he called their names, threw pebbles at their windows.

Two months ago, there were kids playing on this street. Dad didn’t even have a sniffle. I was worried about finishing Lord of the Flies before school started.

He walked the sectors, filling his backpack up with whatever seemed useful or interesting. Even long-dead batteries fished from dumpsters, though he kept these separate from the potentially charged ones. He collected almost finished cans of spray paint, too, using them to dye his hair bright red, which he fancied a warrior-like color. He never saw his friends from school. Maybe they’d been evacuated to the countryside. Maybe it’d be safe for them to come back soon, with their parents. Sort this mess out.

Jack sighed. The sun ventured into another hazy, indeterminate sky.

Things were the way they were right up until they weren’t.

Three months in, Jack was beginning to see the wisdom of looting, himself. Cautious explorations into the previously off-limits places in the mall had revealed food stores that would last him a several months, maybe even a year, in addition to what was left over in the food court, but he had every intention of living longer than that. It might take a while for the remaining adults to come to the city and restore order. Jack had every intention of being alive, satiated, and ready when that happened.

There was a bookstore with a small cafe, he remembered, between the mall and his old neighborhood. These types of spots were the most likely to yield spoils, as the big grocery stores and restaurants were looted as soon as the gangs got wise to the longevity of the crisis. Jack circled the bookstore, finding the lock to the staff door knocked askew. From there, with pliers and a paperclip, he was able to wiggle inside.

The cafe portion was smaller than he remembered, and someone had obviously been picking through the granola bars and chocolate that had once sat by the cash. There were wrappers all over the floor. Still, Jack grabbed a few remaining bars and stuffed them in his backpack. He was contemplating the wisdom of also grabbing a tub of ground coffee behind the counter--he didn’t want to stunt his growth, which already, at 13, seemed painfully stunted--when a voice startled him.

“What are you doing with those?”

Jack whirled around. A girl with an upturned nose and sandy blonde hair, his age or maybe a little older, held a small hammer aloft.

“Ah--sorry, I--I didn’t think--”

“Are you a loco?” she yelled, her voice trembling a little.

“A what?”

“A loco!” The girl indicated his hair. “That’s loco colors.”

“This, I,” Jack stammered. He put his hand in his hair, feeling the stickiness of old spray paint. “No, sorry, I just… did this. Thought I’d fit in better.”

(For the past two months, he’d only seen people at a distance, always children, and often with strange facepaint or colored hair).

The girl lowered her hammer. It occurred belatedly to Jack that, though he didn’t have anything like a weapon in his hands, he probably wasn’t in any danger.

“You don’t look like a loco after all, I guess,” she said. When she came closer Jack could see the dirt on her cheeks had been sawed through with tearlines. He offered her a granola bar from his backpack--one of her own, but it seemed to be the thought that counted.

They sat at one of the steel tables of the cafe, reassuringly solid--bolted to the floor, even.

“M’name’s Dee,” the girl said. She pulled her granola bar apart, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Jack did the same. “My mum worked here, so I came after she didn’t come home from the hospital. I don’t know what I’ll do next.”

To this, there was no possible answer Jack could give.

“What’s a loco?” he asked, after a time.

“You mean you don’t know?”

Jack shook his head.

“They’re bad. What’d you say your name was?”

“Jack.”

“Okay, Jack.” Dee took on the wearied air that slightly older teenagers take with slightly younger teenagers. “You had better find a tribe, because everyone else is. We’re in sector nine, and that’s Loco territory. You don’t want to meet the locos, trust me. They’ll beat you to death and spit on your body.”

Jack almost laughed in spite of himself.

“No--no one’s gone that crazy?”

“Wake up!” Dee waved her hand in the air, gesturing to the overturned shelves, the ripped pages, the wrappers she no longer bothered to collect in a wastebin. “We’re on our own here. No one’s coming to sort this out. And the locos round up strays and sell them for food. Or they eat them themselves.”

Jack was quiet.

“You, Dee,” he said at length. “Are nuts. Absolutely bonkers.”

There was no sense staying in the bookstore. Dee agreed with this, taking only a few moments to round up her hammer, her meager food supply, and a few blankets. Jack decided to grab the coffee after all, and made short work disassembling a few of the appliances in the cafe, storing the most versatile pieces in his backpack.

“No photographs?” he asked. He had a few, in his dad’s old office.

“Nah,” Dee said. “Wanna be able to move light.”

He’d convinced her to come back with him, where he assured her he had a little food to spare. If things were really getting this bad, it wouldn’t hurt to have a partner--someone to monitor the radio, to help him scavenge for food. Dee seemed to know the city.

They darted from alleyway to alleyway, Jack a little lighter on his feet--he thought ruefully that it was the dodging of bullies from his school days that made him nimble. Duncan was right--it was good for his character, in the end.

At the chain-link fence that differentiated Sector 9 and 10, Jack paused.

“Do you hear that?”

Dee lifted the loose netting, shoving her backpack underneath, then worked the rivets in hopes they would give way enough for her to follow.

“C’mon, Jack. We’re exposed out here.”

“No, seriously, that can’t be…”

The more he strained for it the further it seemed. A snatch of something in the air… then gone. Dee pulled three links out, the rust groaning under her urgency. Then--as clear as if it had turned a corner--a police siren.

“Dee, d’you hear that?!”

Jack suddenly felt light-headed. His stomach, twisted so thoroughly into knots these past months that he barely too notice of it anymore, loosened a touch. The adults were back. Order was going to be restored. He could go to school, make something of himself, make his dad proud. Sweat speckled his brow as adrenaline coursed through him. He made as if to move to the sound, only to find his arm captured by Dee’s grip.

“Are you stupid?!”

“Are you ?!” Jack barked, wrenching out of her hands. “Don’t you hear that?--it’s the adults!”

Dee lunged again, grabbing his backpack. A tousle ensued, ending when she kicked his shin. She thrust the backpack underneath the fence with her own.

“We don’t have much time, you idiot, let’s get under this fence and run.”

She smacked Jack’s hand as he reached to grab his backpack back, scrabbling under the fence. He groaned, clutching the links. His good screwdriver was in there. Dee wasn’t seeing sense.

“C’mon, Dee, stop playing around.”

“We’ve got about point five seconds before they find us, Jack, I’m not waiting around for you.”

She took off at a sprint, somewhat overladen by both backpacks. There was still time to follow. But still--the sirens. The adults. Who cared about some granola bars and a few tools? He let out one more frustrated yell, then hit the streets in the other direction, trying to pin the siren to a specific direction as it wailed in his ears, filling them all the way up, until he was no longer sure they were real, or emanating from the part of his body that pulsed hope in him, stored his optimism.

The five seconds it took to correct his assumptions seemed to last a lifetime. Jack could have painted it, had he the skills, so frozen was the moment he rounded the corner, expecting tall, stable, adult police in fitted blazers and finding, instead--

Instead--

Locos.

They held onto the sides of a graffiti’d police car, whooping and carrying burning torches. The car itself careened through the street, scraping against parked, long-abandoned vehicles, accompanied by teenagers in blades, smashing into each other, overturning trash cans and rattling storefront windows. In the police car, clutching the banisters of a makeshift stage, were two figures smeared with black and red paint, brimming with warlike abandon. The smaller one--a girl, Jack noted in the space between his pulse, which seemed to have stopped--turned her head. Even at a distance, he knew she saw him.

“GET HIM,” she screamed.

The sound was not unlike the screech of a hawk diving for prey.

Just two months ago this street had been one where upper form girls met up to get manicures. And their mothers had coffee together down the street.

Jack bolted, sweat making the key in his sock slip and bite into the side of his foot. The siren pounded into him, spurring him onward until he had enough sense to slip into an alley and dive into a dumpster. His lungs stabbed with every breath. A small part of him worried that he’d somehow broken a rib with the exertion.

In the time he spent waiting to be calm enough to venture home again, night had fallen, Dee was nowhere to be seen, and Jack’s eyes were red-rimmed with tears.

He stopped, after that, thinking about the way time was passing. Before, it had seemed that if he reminded himself how short of a time, really, it had been, how little of the world had turned since everything went to shit--well, it seemed equally possible to put it back together. In the months that followed Jack stopped remembering the look of the mall with clean walls and bright, fluorescent lighting. He climbed through every nook and cranny, mapped every entrance. There were quite a few that had gone unnoticed by tribes in the sector. It seemed everyone was leaving him alone, probably assuming the mall was looted to death anyway. Still.

He even painted the walls, further trashing the place--sometimes to create the appearance of being looted, sometimes out of genuine frustration. It kept him from throwing his radio against the wall. It kept him at least a little sane. He practiced with the levers of the gates, in case he needed to quickly barricade himself in. It was getting too heavy and time-sensitive to keep them shut all the time--if he was followed on his way home, then he could trap whoever came after him, maybe force them to trade for their freedom. Not that he left the mall much anyway. Demon Dogz had made sector 10 their battle ground against the Locos for control of the city, unaware they’d caught Jack in the middle.

Four months, maybe. Five or six. It all started to blur, marked by the tastelessness of canned peaches, the static of radio, the whir of his generator, churning through the very little gasoline he had to put in it.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER ONE: JACK FINDS ALLIES; WONDERS HOW HARD IT’D BE TO CHUCK THEM OUT AGAIN

Jack stood at the cafe cupboard holding a tin of baked beans, and for the life of him, could not make himself puncture the lid. His portable camp grill was already lit and merrily burning away his slim propane supply, but even the prospect of heating his meal couldn’t settle the revulsion twisting Jack’s stomach. A cartoon bean beamed at him from the label.

“You’ve had seventeen cans of beans in a row!” it said. “That must be some kind of record.”

I’m going insane, Jack thought.

He needed allies. There was more than tinned beans in the mall--over the last month and a half Jack had collected all the good stuff into a storage cupboard near the service lift--but when things settled down and trading began, mac & cheese and chocolate bars would be liquid gold. The problem was, things didn’t seem to be settling down anytime soon. Certainly not enough for a kid Jack’s size to go wandering to market with a full bag of goodies. If he wanted to preserve the stash, he needed allies who could get more food.

But maybe just this once. That was the other problem: resisting temptation. 

Jack shouldered his travel bag, emptied of all but necessities, to go searching for something new to eat. The Tribes were getting organized in their looting and hoarding; Jack was having to go further and further afield to find shops with products still on the shelves. Still, too much time in the mall made him stir-crazy and there was always the possibility of finding Dee again, who to date had still been the only living being he’d seen that didn’t immediately start after him like he was a fat calf. If he had to, maybe he could go hunting for strays like the Locos did and form his own tribe, but as he still hadn’t managed to grow an inch since the virus, a better plan would be to find a smallish tribe, one he could keep relatively under control, and convince them to make the mall their new base. They could work out the leadership and stuff from there, and Jack would stay fed.

(And the good food under lock and key, but he wasn’t too worried about that. They’d thank him when it meant trading for generators or things). 

He was scanning the street from the topmost level of the carpark when he heard shouting. A stand-off had emerged in front of the mall’s entrance; on one side, the Locos, on the other, Demon Dogz. Great. There’d be no going out today. These kinds of battles always left dazed stragglers around. He’d better go close the grails. Something held him there a moment long, squinting into the mayhem--a small group had peeled out of hiding and was heading into the carpark, and a few Demon Dogz were in pursuit.

Jack scrambled to his feet and down the service stairwell, kicking open the door to the third level and getting to the winches with no more than a second to spare before they were walking in; a few girls, and little children. And a dog.

The Dogz pursuing them couldn’t be far behind. Jack gripped the lever so hard his hand shook. He could close the safety grails now, if he wanted, but if he timed things correctly, he could trap them--maybe ransom them for food. 

“Focus, Jack,” he whispered. The group sitting at the fountain hadn’t yet realized they were being followed. He let the lever fly as soon as they came round the corner, capitalizing on their seconds of confusion to get their escape cut off as well, as neat as the endless drills Jack had done for exactly this purpose. Suddenly, he felt quite capable, nevermind the shakes that nearly made his knees buckle.

“Seems you’ve got something to say to me,” he announced from the top of his stairs. He fancied he cut a nice figure, cool as ice. “In my day it was ‘thank you,’ but--times’re changing.” 

-

It was nice to show off the mall to appreciators. Dal, who he’d initially mistaken for one of the children, was around his height and age, and it gave Jack a buoying sense of excitement that he might finally have a peer around. The girls were alright, too--the looks on their faces when Jack revealed the intact furniture store, complete with mattresses and feather pillows, was particularly satisfying. He wasn’t moved by Dal and Amber’s skepticism, or their assertions that they’d be moving on (potentially leaving him to play houses with three kids and a dog, which was a horrifying thought)--none of them could hide their wide eyes over the space and resources in the mall, or their delight over ketchup. Amber was especially alright; she had an easy authority about her.

Once their captives--who as it turned out were not Demon Dogz after all--could be sorted, things would work out nearly as perfect as Jack imagined. He’d been due for a run of good luck, after all his hard work.

In the morning, Jack woke and set to work on the radio with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. Finally, a shred of evidence that not everyone had lost their minds. 

A bubble of anticipation rose in his throat as Dal came over his shoulder.

“You know what your problem is?” Dal asked. “You’re not practical.”

The bubble popped.

“We have to start again,” Dal went on. “Basic tools, basic skills… that’s what we need now.”

“Really?” Jack spat. “And who was it trapped those animals out there? The ones chasing you?” He gesticulated forcefully at the radio, which was continuing its greatest hits of static program. “If you’re so smart, you can help me fix this.”

Dal laughed. 

“There’s nothing wrong with your radio, dummy. If there are any adults in the world, no television, no internet--what’s the first thing they’d do? Use the radio, just like you. No one’s answering because no one’s there.”

Briefly, Jack considered just hitting the other boy for saying so. But just as quickly, the fight went out of him. It was so much easier to believe that someone was coming when Jack was alone--no need to defend his hopes, definitely no one to laugh at him. I wanted allies , Jack reminded himself. Well, I’ve got them . He threw himself back in his seat. “But they can’t have all gone,” he muttered.

Jack thought he saw a flash of sympathy on Dal’s face. That helped, a little.

It just couldn’t be how it was, though. What about scientists researching in Antarctica? In the Himalayas? There had to be someone the virus didn’t get. Maybe they were in a bunker waiting for the virus to disappear, with no way of radioing. Jack could make do with these guys for the six months, maybe year it took for them to return. The thought that they wouldn’t, ever, was too horrible to consider--how would they get medicine, or communicate with each other? What about clean water, electricity, showering? (Showering was of chief concern; contact with other people reminded Jack just how little everyone had had a chance to wash, and he was sure he didn’t smell like roses, either.) The day before Duncan died Jack had sat at his bedside and begged him not to go. Their parents were already dead.

“Just--hold out, Sprocket,” Duncan said. That was their dad’s pet name for when they were being childish. In the morning Duncan was gone; by the time Jack slipped in to retrieve Duncan’s valuables, he was cold and somehow also stinking. If there really, truly were no adults--what was the point of holding out?

“Jack, Dal?” 

A voice broke through Jack’s reverie. Dal’s girlfriend or sister or something--Amber. “The animals are awake,” she announced. “We need to decide what to do.” This, Jack was all too keen to let someone else decide--he’d gone over it last night, and the black-haired dickhead was definitely not going to go quietly, if he left at all. But if they had to keep the three in the cage, what then? The thought wasn’t a fun one. Jack had already been called a nerd too many times for one morning. 

“So, what do we do about them?”

“Well, first things,” Amber said. “What do we do about us? We need a place to stay. I think it should be here.”

Dal folded his arms and eyed Jack. “I don’t believe this.”

“The others’d never survive without us, Dal,” she said. “We need to stick together.”

“What, like, form our own tribe?”

Jack bit his tongue to keep from grinning. Not bad. Amber was sensible, and Dal was smart, if not a little annoying, and best of all, they’d trusted him enough to loop him in. Jack appreciated people who were fair. People who were fair wouldn’t take run of the place without his say-so.

“So,” Jack concluded, feigning nonchalance over the new order of things. “Those animals--do we let them in, or kick them out, boss?”

-

By the time Lex had been installed in the mall a day, Jack was sorely, deeply, totally, with all his heart, regretting leaving the decision up to Amber. Ryan didn’t seem so bad, though he was insufferably dull, and Zandra was harmless, if not vapid, but Lex was going to be the reason Jack’s eyeballs would get stuck rolled halfway into his skull. And that was Lex on his best behavior. Lex swaggered. Lex shoved. Lex barked orders like Jack was his little lackey. And, oh yeah--he’d went to investigate thumping in the sewers and accidentally come back with expecting parents.

Jack was getting a headache from all this teeth grinding.

It wasn’t as if he disagreed with Bray--that was the dad’s name, Bray--’s methods, he admitted, fiddling with his radio once again. Flipping through frequency after frequency. After all, it was roughly the same as his own plan--find a few other people with at least a modicum of common sense left over and eat their food. He’d voted against them staying, and now, as for the last six hours, all he could hear through the radio static was Trudy screaming her head off. Jack’s stomach grumbled, but he couldn’t stand spending another minute listening to Lex mouth off in the cafe, and his stash was out of the question--since those terrible twins had caught him out.

If he was being honest, the situation had spun way out of control.

“Hey, Jack,” Dal poked his head around the workshop entryway. “Are you gonna come up? We think the baby’s gonna be born soon. I’ve got to go get some stuff for it.”

Dal was one of the brighter points of the new arrangement. He was by far the best of all Jack’s new roommates--he seemed genuinely interested in Jack’s ideas, even if he did make fun of them, and him and Amber were a good team, even if they weren’t actually dating--a fact Jack was strangely relieved over. 

“Yeah,” Jack said. The Tribe--as yet unnamed--were all sitting on the front stairs. Jack set the radio aside and slouched his way over to them. The kids--Patsy, Paul, and Cloe, were managing to look deceptively sweet, cuddling Bob the Dog and watching across the second level with big eyes (Jack knew better; P&P at least, we monsters). Ryan patted the stair next to him and slapped Jack’s back affectionately when he sat down. Altogether like that, and over something other than food or huddling in fear from a bigger gang, Jack couldn’t help but feel a nostalgic something , an annoyance rolled into happiness that he could only really place in the context of--well, family.

“I’m taking bets on whether it’s a boy or a girl--who wants in?” Ryan grinned.

“I’ve got a whistle,” Jack blurted, pulling it from his pocket. It was his father’s, attached to the mall keyring. Jack always fancied it a bit of a last resort thing. It felt symbolic to offer it up over Trudy’s baby. Not that he was looking forward to a baby crying all the time. But still.

“So what’ll you give me?” Jack asked. “If I win?”

“Coupla quid?”

Jack sputtered. “Two quid? What good’s that?”

“Well, what good’s a whistle?”

Ryan was spared from Jack’s answer by a huge scream from across the atrium, and Amber bounding out to announce that the head had emerged. Suddenly everyone seemed to be clutching something--even Zandra was holding Cloe’s hand, and Patsy had wrapped herself so thoroughly around Jack’s arm that he was losing circulation. The moment stretched itself finer and finer, like taffy being pulled, and then announced itself with another, tinier but determinedly alive cry. Even paying up his whistle to Ryan couldn’t dampen things. Even when Trudy walked in, absolutely ready to pop, Jack hadn’t been able to wrap his brain around it--that with no one to run the show, no doctors or medics, and in this horrible, dirty nightmare of the world they’d been promised, things could turn out a healthy, squalling, heap of baby. A girl, at that. Jack had imagined that when the adults returned they’d find most of the children left behind dead or missing from something-or-other, but look there. In the Mall, they were going ahead and giving the number some help.

Dal slipped under the half-raised grail and caught Jack’s eye, a question in his raised eyebrow. Jack felt his face split wide into a grin.

-

Of course, Jack thought. Everyone knows newborns are brilliant for sleep and morale in the longterm, aren’t they? He mashed his pillow over his head and screamed into it. Doors. He and Dal could see about getting doors, so that the little fleshball could scream without it echoing into every corner in the mall. Even with the screaming, things had settled, somewhat. Most of Jack’s new tribe were settled in the furniture store, but a few had seen the aesthetic potential and fun of taking over shopfronts. Zandra was in the lingerie store (by far one of the most well-preserved spaces, as Jack had been too embarrassed to step in to trash it), Bray had taken the hat shop, Lex and Ryan were in a clothing boutique, and Dal had dragged a twin-size mattress down to the magazine shop, which adjoined Jack’s workshop. Through the big, fearsome hole between shops--another of Jack’s stir-crazy solo projects--he could see Dal’s chest rise and fall. How could he sleep so easily?

Something about the movement, the up-down rhythm, the grumbling breaths Jack caught between Little NoName’s crying, was soothing. The weather was starting to get grim again. No one could tell for sure what day it was--they had all, in their own way, tried to keep count, and lost it over the long months--but Jack figured it was around his birthday. He’d be fourteen. 

No parents. No siblings. No home. No safety. But he had a tribe, and he’d lived another year. 

Life had fallen into a sort of routine. Sleep-deprived, Jack would spend the mornings checking the radio and the afternoons dodging Lex, who was prone to throwing him against walls if he didn’t get a regular supply of batteries for his gameboy. If Lex was cowed from going toe-to-toe with Amber, Dal would come in with plans for survival tech--despite an early screaming match about the subject. Jack was most concerned about water--Lex’s secret stash would deplete things quicker than anyone was expecting--but Dal was more concerned over indoor agriculture rigs.

“I read about these upright gardens, they’re magnificent,” he said, passing Jack a screwdriver. “We could get some shelving, rig up a kind of mister to keep them watered--you can grow potatoes, even.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “What about sunlight, smart guy?”

“There’s sun lamps, aren’t there?”

“‘Spose,” he allowed. There was all manner of resource out there, but as long as there were locos, too, it didn’t make a bit of difference. 

“Did you see Trudy this morning?” Dal asked. He flipped idly through an engineering textbook, trailing his fingers over the pages without paying any special attention. “I wonder who’s going to tell her Bray split. Did you know no one’s seen him the last forty-eight hours? She looks rough.”

Jack shrugged. “Hope he’s not sticking her with us.”

“Have some compassion.” Dal slammed the textbook shut, startling Jack out of his work disassembling an RC toy. “She’s just had a baby.”

“Don’t I know it,” Jack grumbled under his breath. As if on cue, NoName set up a vicious, hacking cry that left Jack wondering if it was possible for an infant to sob itself to death. A chorus of coughs came alongside--Trudy, probably. Amber and him had spent the night after the birth last week scrubbing her linens, matted with blood clots. Despite himself, an ache of sympathy rose in Jack’s chest. He’d always been a bit of a wimp about blood. He supposed he’d care very little about a baby waking everyone up, too, if he’d gone through all that. 

“I’m worried she might catch fever,” Dal said. “I wish I’d thought to stock up on medicines and things before everything went crazy. Raiding a hospital seemed crazy until it was too late.”

“Your parents were doctors?” Jack asked. It explained a lot; Dal’s calm, measured intellect in particular.

“Both of them. They worked at the hospital in sector fifteen. I’d bet a good supply is still there--antibiotics and things.”

“Dal.” Jack’s voice took on a low, warning tone. “Don’t even think it.”

Dal huffed back in his seat. A quiet resumed between them, as Jack delved in to the toy’s battery system. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was looking for--maybe, if he could fix the toy car to be self-charging like a real one, he could reproduce the process on a larger scale. Hamster wheel, maybe. They could all do with practice running. 

“What about your family?” Dal asked at length.

“Um,” Jack said, separating thin wires within the toy so they wouldn’t get tangled. “Hold on--what, oh, family. Spose you’re looking at it. Dad worked security here. By the time mum was, you know,”--Jack couldn’t bring himself to say dead , despite how many dead people he’d seen in the last year--“he gave me the keys and taught me a bit about hotwiring. Had to keep the grille working.”

A long pause suspended before Jack added, “I had a brother, too.”

If Duncan had been a year or two younger… but it didn’t bear thinking about. 

“Only child here. But I guess you could call Amber my sister. She was my neighbor.”

“Thought she was your girlfriend when you first walked in,” Jack said airily. 

“Bleaugh,” Dal bleaughed. “Couldn’t even imagine it. We grew up together. Why, are you interested?”

“Me?” Jack nearly stood in outrage and whacked his knee on the underside of his desk. “Get off it, man.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her you fancy a date,” Dal said, standing himself and gathering dishes.

“ Dal. ”

“See you, Jack,” he said, breezing out of the room and leaving Jack with a curiously quick pulse, for all that they’d been working on electrical systems. 

-

Within a day, Jack’s attention pivoted to the problem of clean water. Especially with Caveman Lex hoarding nearly a third of Jack’s original supply, and the terrible two filching from his special stash, Jack was beginning to feel the burn. Literally. His lips were perpetually chapped. Everyone had gone grumpy. More than that, the mall was beginning to take on a pongy smell--no one wanted to use their rations up on washing except Zandra. 

Dal was already up and out of bed when Jack awoke. Jack looked for him in the cafe (beans for breakfast was somewhat easier when everyone else had to suffer it too), then Amber’s room--she’d taken up in Velvit, the old candy shoppe, which Jack found to be something of a mismatch, personality-wise. 

“Jack?” Amber put a thumb in her book. 

“Just, uh, looking for Dal?”

She sighed. “He left about an hour ago. He’s going to try and find medicine for Trudy.”

“What?!” Jack sputtered. “Out with those circus loonies in fifteen? Even the Demon Dogz don’t go there!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Amber flung the book aside and chewed on her thumb. “I’m not his mom, Jack, I don’t get to say where he goes.”

Jack flopped heavily onto the bed beside Amber. 

“Doesn’t it seem like it should be Bray out getting that stuff?”

Amber rolled her eyes. “Dad of the Year still hasn’t come back. Believe me, I’m as angry as you are that he’s foisted all this onto Dal.” She drew her feet in to make room for Jack, hugging around her knees and looking, for a moment, like the fifteen-year-old she was. “It’s nice that you two are getting close. Dal always needed someone who could keep up with his mad ideas.”

Jack shrugged. 

“‘spose he’s useful,” he allowed.

Amber snorted, then squeezed his shoulder once, a clear dismissal. “I’ve known Dal a long time, Jack. He’s quick. I’ll send him to you when he’s back.”

Jack retreated to his workshop to continue his experiments with filtration, though without any zeal. A painful knot in his stomach twisted the longer the day went on without Dal--by evening, he’d become so anxious that he skipped dinner with the rest, leaning morosely over his radio. The red-headed girl--Sally?--found him there, shuffling into his workshop like a scared rabbit. She was so quite about it Jack nearly didn’t have time to hide his can of peaches--a bitter loss over temptation from his private stash. 

“Am I disturbing you?”

Jack let his silence speak for him.

“I just thought I’d tell everyone--I want to give the baby a bath. She’s starting to smell.”

“What are you telling me for?” The whine of static from his radio cut a throbbing line right through his brainstem. 

“Well, it’s gonna take more than one water ration. I figured since we’re a share everything group--”

“I’m not giving up my ration for that!” Jack exploded. With Dal out on the street--or more likely, getting beat to death by a tribe of psychopaths by now--a pongy baby was the least of his worries. 

“But the baby needs to be clean!”

“Well, I need to not die of thirst!”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic!” The girl flounced from the room. Salene , Jack remembered abruptly. Salene, Patsy, and Paul. The terrible trio . The roof access was near the storerooms; Jack stomped there now and climbed the maintenance staircase to the hatch. A wave of chill hit him as he shouldered it open and clambered to his feet, but the sky above was fading into a brilliantly clear sunset, lingering as long as it possibly could. To the west, Jack could make out both woodland and train station, Loco territory unless you could make it into the trees. To the east, where sector fifteen lay out of sight, nothing. He sighed. What was he doing getting so hung up over Dal? If Duncan were around, he’d accuse him of having a--Jack refused to finish the thought. 

-

Sounds in his workshop--just what he needed. Jack swung over the threshold and snatched a disassembled battery out of Ryan’s hands. He was getting dangerously close to poking at Jack’s radio, and Lex had swaggered in and set up like he owned the place.

“Do you have any idea how important this radio is?”

“I was being careful!” Ryan protested.

“And you!” Jack whirled on Lex. “I didn’t give you permission to use my batteries on your moronic game!”

“I’m sharpening my reflexes,” said Lex, unconcerned. “Improving my hand coordination.”

Jack shouldered past Ryan and attempted to grab the console our of Lex’s hands--a move he immediately regretted as Lex stood, asserting nearly a foot of height on him. The older teen loomed over Jack with a murderous expression on his face, before removing the batteries and stalking out of the workshop.

“If he follow me, I’ll hit him,” Lex remarked. “Oh, looks like I’ll have to hit him. Hold him, Ryan.”

Ryan pulled Jack’s arms back, completely unaffected by his struggling. Humiliatingly, Jack could tell that Ryan was being careful with him. Like I’m a baby bird he’s nursing back to health , he thought darkly. Mustn’t squeeze little Jack’s bones too hard. The Lex problem was getting way out of hand. There wasn’t a single person besides Ryan who could vouch for him, including his little girlfriend, Zandra--Amber had even tussled with Lex, as even-keeled as she was. She’d dropped him to the ground for messing with her. And while that was all well and good for Amber, she at least had a height advantage on Lex. 

We could make booby traps for the workshop , Jack thought furiously. Electrified doorknobs. Motion sensing falling logs. Really tight handcuffs. Or just maim him while he sleeps.

Jack braced himself to take a real hit--something that hadn’t yet materialized out of Lex’s threats but was bound to come any day now--when the frantic slap of footsteps made them all turn. It was Dal, dashing up the steps to the second level.

Dal!

“I’ve got it!” Dal shouted. Jack wiggled out of Ryan’s grip and scrambled up the stairs after him. “Trudy, hold on! Trudy!”

-

In the end, Jack had to practically drag Dal away from Trudy’s side. 

“Watched pot never boils,” he said.

“Terrible, terrible comment,” Dal shot back. But he smiled.

“You uh, get in to trouble?” Stop blushing! Jack informed his brain.

“Had to dodge a pack of Locos on the way, but it was fine.”

They sat in the Cafe together, where Jack watched Dal heat a meal of beans and ketchup. What did he normally do with his hands? He tried setting them palms down on the table in front of him. That seemed too formal. Then in his lap. That seemed suspicious. He put his elbows up and leaned his chin in his palm. There. Nothing odd about that.

“You alright?” Dal set his plate down. “What’s wrong with your shoulders, are you stiff?”

Jack lowered them so fast he nearly got a crick.

“Dal, I, uh,” he started. What would be the best, non-embarrassing way to phrase this? “It was stupid to go get the antibiotics.”

“Oh, don’t you start on this too, I already got an earful from Amber.”

“No! No, I mean, well.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Thought it was good of you to do it anyway, that’s all. I mean, Trudy’s not exactly a cup of sunshine, is she?”

“Nice to know your empathy is alive and kicking,” Dal said, but he looked pleased anyway. Enough to follow Jack back to the workshop for the evening, which turned into late night, considering methods of water collection and filtration. They called it a night only when Jack’s voice started to go, retreating, giggling, to beds that were twenty feet away. Jack screwed his eyes shut, pretending to sleep until he heard Dal’s breathe even, the smallest snores, and he opened them again until he could make Dal out in the blueish dark. 

I’m just glad he’s not dead, thought Jack. That’s all .

And before he could get closer to untangling the knot in his head--there came the ear-splitting wail of an infant above their heads. Like every night. For the first time, though, it was hard for Jack to work up any great annoyance over it.