Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Ghoul."

"Ghoul."

"Gho-o-o-o-oul." Poison drew out the vowel, and Ghoul groaned into his pillow, willing the light and the idiot outside his cot to go away.

"Shut up, Poison," he said. He was not having this. Not this early in the morning. Not when he’d gotten beaten up last night and his whole body felt like a bruise. No, sir, not today.

"Lazy bones," Poison said. Ghoul peeled open his eyes and startled at the sight of Poison's face hovering inches from his own. He let out an embarrassing squawk and went tumbling to the floor in a tangle of blanket.

"Fuck, Ghoul," Poison said. He wasn't laughing, which struck Ghoul as odd as he lay there aching on the floor.

"What?" he said. He could sleep right here. Nice, comfy linoleum.

"There's blood on your shirt."

"Oh," Ghoul said. Now there was no hope of getting back to sleep, so he sat up, rubbing his eyes. He pushed the hair out of his face. "Don't know where that came from."

This was a lie, and Poison knew it. He dropped to his knees and grabbed Ghoul by the arm, making him wince in pain. There was no use hiding it. The sleeve of his tee-shirt was crusted with dry blood from a graze on his shoulder. It had to have torn open in the night, because it wasn't bleeding when Ghoul had gone to sleep.

"What’s this?"

“Jeez, Poison, it’s just a graze.” Poison pushed up the sleeve and Ghoul let him, rolling his eyes as Poison peered at the wound that was supposed to be cauterized by the heat of the blaster shot.

"Did you get in a clap and not tell us?" Poison asked in mock-hurt.

"It was while I was doing the perimeter last night," Ghoul admitted. He cut Poison off when he started spluttering. "It was one drac. I handled it."

"Oh, yeah, you handled it. Not a scratch on you."

"Poison-"

"Jet!” Poison shouted. “Ghoul's hemorrhaging!" Ghoul sighed and laid back down on the floor.

"Don't you have things to do?" he said, poking the closest body part of Poison's he could reach, which turned out to be his calf. He wasn't wearing boots, just his nasty, lemon-yellow socks.

Jet Star skidded into the room, Show Pony’s medical bag swinging in his hand. "Hemorrhaging?" he said, concerned.

"No," Ghoul said. "I got in a clap last night and got grazed. Poison's being dramatic."

“I know Poison’s being dramatic,” Jet said, kneeling. “Doesn’t mean you’re not hurt.”

Ghoul, letting go of his hopes of more sleep, sat up on the edge of his cot, holding out his arm. Jet rolled up his sleeve and started poking at the cut with a damp piece of gauze. Normally Show Pony was the one you went to when you were nearly dust, but they and Dr. D were out, and Jet was good for small stuff.

“You’re not wearing jeans,” Ghoul said, just noticing.

“Yeah,” Jet said. He sure wasn’t. He was wearing these polka-dot flannel pants that were almost as terrible as Poison’s socks.

“We havin’ a pajama party today or something?” Ghoul said, then hissed through his teeth when Jet prodded his tender elbow. If he didn’t acknowledge it he didn’t have to deal with the fact that it was probably sprained, so he didn’t look at it.

“Day off,” Poison said. He threw himself down on Ghoul’s cot, and Ghoul threw a half-hearted punch at him. Out of love, of course.

“Day off?” Ghoul said. “Is that why you’re wearing those piss socks?”

“They are the color of fucking daffodils,” Poison said, then tried to shove his foot in Ghoul’s face. Ghoul’s shriek of alarm was completely justified, and he shoved Poison off him so hard he went tumbling to the floor.

“Stop moving,” Jet chided. He ignored Poison when he started moaning in pain. Ghoul sat still like a model patient and let Jet bandage his arm. One set of bandages kept the blaster graze from cracking open and bleeding again, and the other immobilized his elbow. Both of them throbbed in sluggish time with his heartbeat.

“Sprained,” Jet explained, when Ghoul held out his elbow in mute question. “You gotta stop hyperextending this thing. Pretty soon it’s gonna bend all the way backwards and just stick like that.”

Ghoul went, “Eugh,” at that mental image.

“That’s gross, Jet,” Poison said.

“You’re gross,” Jet said. Poison didn’t argue.

“Where’s Kobra?” Ghoul asked, watching Jet twist some bandages into something that resembled a sling.

“Just for today,” Jet said, in response to Ghoul’s look of disgust. “Kobra’s making bagels.”

“But I used the toaster to fix the radio last week,” Ghoul said.

“Yeah, he’s using the microwave,” Poison said.

“How’s that supposed to work?”

“He’s the kung-fu master, babe,” Poison said. “He can grill a salamander just by lookin’ at it.”

“Then why doesn’t he just grill the bagel by lookin’ at it?”

Then Kobra materialized in the doorway, making everyone jump. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses, and to Ghoul’s immense enjoyment had on polka-dot pants that matched Jet Star’s.

“Nice pants, Kobra," he snickered.

Kobra drew himself up proudly. “Thank you,” he preened. “Bagels are ready-” Then his eye caught on Ghoul’s slung arm, the blood still dried on his shirt. “That’s why there was a ghosted drac outside,” he said.

“Is it still there?” Ghoul knew that was a stupid question before it even left his mouth. Everyone knew all bodies disappeared overnight in the desert.

“Was,” Kobra repeated. He never was a guy of many words. Poison talked enough for the pair of them. “Come get bagels.”

He left for the kitchen, trusting that Ghoul and the others were hungry enough to follow. Ghoul stood up, the knee the Drac had kicked out throbbing with each step. He wasn’t too worried. Stuff like this only hurt in the mornings. Once the waking-up stiffness went away he wouldn’t even notice the pain. The only reason he was this banged up was that he’d been taken by surprise. He wasn’t exactly expecting to see a drac coming at him with a hypodermic needle in one hand and a blaster in the other. He had no idea why the drac had a needle, but didn't care too much. Probably picked it up off some twitch. They weren’t the brightest, draculoids.

The bagels were fucking good, and Ghoul had no idea how Kobra had managed to toast them so well in a microwave. Cream cheese was too expensive, but butter was fine and dandy as a topping. You could buy it by the stick in Zone 4. It was a recently re-acquired luxury in the diner after the month-long ban put in place by Kobra the kung-fu master himself. He’d walked in on Poison and Ghoul’s competition to see who could eat a full stick the fastest and promptly laid down the law. No butter if they were just gonna "waste it." Ghoul would have won, in his own unbiased opinion.

"So what's this 'day off' shit?" Ghoul asked. He was trying discreetly to slip the sling off his shoulder, but Jet Star fixed him with a stare. He pretended he was just adjusting it all along.

"Day off," Poison said, waving an ungloved hand.

"Real explanatory."

"It means," said Jet, "we're not fighting dracs, we're not hustling anybody for parts, and we're going to try our best to not be in mortal danger for at least twelve hours."

"Doesn't 'day' constitute twenty-four hours?" Kobra asked.

"Me and Poison decided that was too tall of an order," Jet said.

"Nonsense," Poison said. "Safety is my middle name."

Ghoul picked up an empty can from the table and threw it at him. "So what do we do?"

"Relax, I guess," Jet said.

That caused a lull in the conversation in which nobody had any good ideas. “Relax” wasn’t really in their vocabulary. There was free time, sure, in the desert, but Ghoul couldn’t remember the last time he used that time to full-on take a chill pill. There was always something to do: radio antennas to repair by climbing up on the roof of the garage, patrols for stranded zone rats, running for their lives from draculoids, et cetera. The closest Ghoul got to relaxing was holing himself up in his workshop and messing with his explosives kit.

"Should we take a drive?" Kobra suggested.

Nobody could think of anything better, so Poison grabbed the keys to the Trans Am and started out the door, all swagger and red target hair.

"Wait, motherfucker," Jet said. "Are you forgetting something?"

Poison looked down at himself, at his bare feet and homemade Mad Gear tee shirt, exposing pale arms that would turn the color of his hair if baked out in the sun for more than an hour. "No," he said.

Kobra threw Poison's boots at him, and to Ghoul's astonishment, he caught both of them. Kobra and Jet both found their shoes in the mess of stuff by the diner door. Ghoul had fallen asleep in his. All things considered, he was the most prepared, which never happened.

It was less frantic than a normal suit-up and involved a cross-diner trip to their room to get actual pants, but they tossed their jackets and masks to each other all the same. Kobra tossed to Ghoul and Ghoul to Poison and Poison to Jet. Jet tossed masks and Poison was first out the door.

"You think we should go to Zone 4?" Kobra asked. "It's where I got the bagels."

"Where? At the truck stop?"

"Where else?"

"I want more bagels," Poison said, which decided the issue. He slid into the driver's seat, as ordained by the universal forces of his leadership. The three-way rock paper scissors match between Ghoul, Jet, and Kobra for shotgun almost ended in blood. Ghoul was victorious not because he played the injury card, but because he threatened to kiss Kobra on the mouth if he didn't back down. Jet laughed too hard to continue the fight, and Kobra ceded the seat. He’d had shotgun for the past week, and now he was finally knocked off his throne. Vengeance was sweet, Ghoul thought, as he kicked his feet up on the dash.

Mad Gear blared on the radio in Dr. Death Defying's temporary absence. He and Show Pony were on a rendezvous in Zone 2, picking around for radio equipment. Ghoul could practically taste Cherri Cola's record spinning from beyond the speakers. No one else would play Scarmasm and USA? back-to-back. Cherri was a wavy DJ, so much better than Show Pony. Ghoul still had nightmares about Pony's infamous "twelve hours of American Pie," the slogan: "Music's back from the dead and you're probably wishing it had stayed ghosted by now."

Poison sang along in a voice rough with dust and the edge of cigarette smoke it hadn’t quite lost from his four years clean. Ghoul tapped his toe against the windshield to the beat as they shot down Route Guano. Windows open, blasters low, they cruised.

Chapter Text

Zone 4 was the best for parts, but the exception to that rule was the truck stop. Ghoul had no idea how Babycakes and Johnny Darko kept the place running so far away from any drac outposts they could steal food from. They even had gators—those little packets of powdered drink mix that were like liquid crack. Poison always had his eye out for those. His favorite was green.

They hit the bluffs that marked the inner border of Zone 4. This was where the Zones started to get wavy the further down Route Guano you went. The inner edge of Four wasn’t much different. Just less hot. It was out of the range of the monster Battery City climate regulators that pumped heat back out into the desert and scorched the closer Zones into triple digits. Towards the outer edge and once you hit the mountains at the edge of Zone 5, shit got weird. Nights got cold, seasons changed like Before, and zone runner accents grew so thick Ghoul had trouble understanding them. Even though he’d fled Bat City nine years ago.

Zone 4 wasn’t quite so removed from Battery City, close enough to have a paved road or three. Poison turned off Route Guano and made for the truck stop. From the looks of the parking, Ghoul reckoned it was busy. Busy was good if it was the right kind of people. It may be a day off, but he wasn’t crazy; he kept his blaster secured to his belt as they entered. Poison made them spin in the rotating door until he was satisfied they could barely tell where the ground was, then stepped in and announced, “Chow mein, motherfuckers!” as was customary, Ghoul supposed, on whatever fucking planet he came from.

The maybe-ten runners squeezed up to the bar welcomed them with shouts of “Killjoys!” and Ghoul had a hell yeah feeling all the way down to his toes. They were all crash queens with colors, and didn’t hesitate to pull Ghoul, Poison, Jet, and Kobra up to the bar. Ghoul tried to discreetly brace himself against the bar because he didn’t quite trust his knees yet.

Babycakes, behind the bar, went, “As I was fuckin’ saying–” but flashed a grin to show he wasn’t really angry at the interruption. He always made Ghoul feel like a kid just because he was about thirteen feet tall and nineteen times that in weight. He’d never hurt a fly, ol’ Babycakes. It was Johnny Darko you had to watch out for. She was as lethal with a spatula as she was with a blaster, which was to say very.

Poison shouted, “Johnny!” back into the kitchen. “Eight carbons for four grilled cheeses?”

“Woulda did it for six, fucko,” she said. Poison dug in his pocket for the money and folded the eight carbons up into a napkin like a little paper airplane. Ever the sharpshooter, he flicked it right into Johnny’s hat.

“Grilled fuckin’ cheese.” Ghoul elbowed Jet.

“Grilled fuckin’ cheese,” Jet agreed. Then Ghoul noticed eyes on him.

“Sorry,” he said, realizing he was holding up what was probably an interesting story Babycakes was itching to cough up, and no short of all the crash queens in the bar were glaring at him and his crew. He made a show of zipping his lips, folding his hands, and being a good listener. He’d been practicing; he could sit like this for a whole five minutes. That was about his limit. He thought Kobra took all the zen in the divorce or something. He could sit for weeks, unbothered, undisturbed, existing as a fixed point, a critical mass of so much cool it broke through spacetime and created a black hole.

“So as I was saying,” Babycakes started, for the third time. “Me and Johnny snipped a haunt three–”

Johnny interjected, “Two.”

“–two days ago.”

“On your lonesome?” a crash queen with a sick fucking cowboy hat asked.

“Only ‘cause it wasn’t even a haunt. Just dracs without a Scarecrow. And get an ear on this.” He leaned in all secret-like. “They all had syringes.”

He leaned back as if expecting an uproar of disbelief from the gathered crash queens, but they all just sort of blinked at him. Ghoul, on the other hand, felt his bones itch. He turned to Jet but remembered he hadn’t told him about the night before. Jet only knew that he’d ghosted the drac outside the diner, not what it was carrying.

“Syringes,” Babycakes said again. “Pokies, snakebites. Come on, that’s at least an earthquake.”

“Nah, Cakes, we believe you, but what happened then? After you ghosted them?”

“Yeah, what was in ‘em?”

“Here’s the rub. As soon as me and Johnny opened the canisters the stuff inside evaporated.” He did a wiggly motion with his fingers.

“That is interesting,” Jet Star said, intrigued in a way that kept him in his seat. Ghoul, on the other hand, felt like he was about to vibrate out of his skin. That drac wasn’t an anomaly. He thought the snakebite had looked weird—bulky and cartoonish—not like something you’d pick up off a twitch. He elbowed Jet and Poison. He couldn’t reach Kobra, but Kobra could hear a rolling tumbleweed from a half-mile away; he’d hear. Ghoul raised an eyebrow laden with meaning. Jet and Poison both leaned in conspiratorially. They drew eyes from the others at the bar, but Ghoul didn’t care.

“You know that drac I ghosted last night?” Ghoul asked.

“Don’t tell me it had a syringe,” Jet said.

Ghoul nodded, and Poison went, “Ooh,” propping his chin in his hand. “Same kind? Did the stuff evaporate?”

“Dunno,” Ghoul said. “I didn’t mess with it. It didn’t look normal, though.”

Jet Star’s brow furrowed. Poison’s eyes shone and Ghoul could see the promise of adventure, of conspiracy reflected in copper irises behind his mask. It made Ghoul’s lip pull up in a grin. He couldn’t help that he was chemically repellent to days off. Trouble found them in the way sand found its way into boots: inevitably.

“The hell do you think BL/ind is up to?” Poison said.

Jet scoffed. “Nothing good,” he said. Just then, Babycakes handed over their grilled cheeses. Kobra materialized at Poison’s side, and the syringe issue took a back seat in the face of Johnny’s perfectly toasted, buttery bread and heavenly melted cheese. There was barely anything better on this earth, Ghoul was sure. The whole way through his sandwich, Poison professed his undying love for Johnny with his mouth full of cheese. Ghoul figured she might get tired of zone runners praising her cooking, but you couldn’t expect much else from people who regularly ate dog food.

Conversation rolled fast through the truck stop as zone runners filtered through. Babycakes recounted his drac story about fifteen times. Every time someone left he told them to be careful, to which they responded, “Will do, Cakes.” The crash queen in the cowboy hat went, “Say thankya.” They were damn cool. Ghoul hoped he’d see them around again.

Ghoul had been vibrating in his seat since they arrived, and as the day went on he could see the same uneasiness in Poison. They didn’t have many excuses to stay anymore, and it had been a minute since they’d checked the radio for anything from Cherri. Just because they were taking a day off didn’t mean BL/ind was. Today wasn’t, Ghoul thought, much of a day off after all, what with these new mysterious dracs running the zones. He wasn’t too disappointed; twelve hours of calm was too tall of an order. They barely knew what to do with themselves.

“You guys wanna bounce?” Poison asked.

Kobra nodded microscopically, and Ghoul went, “Fucking finally,” and pushed himself to his feet from his barstool. There were only two other runners at the bar, and both were in deep conversation with Johnny. She was sitting up on the counter, showing them the buckles on her boots.

“We’re gonna dip, Babycakes,” Poison said.

“Be careful,” Cakes said, immediately.

“Careful is my middle name,” Poison said. As if to illustrate his point, he took his blaster out of its holster and spun the trigger guard around his finger.

Kobra fixed him with a flat, sunglassed look, just as Jet said, “You’re the least fucking careful person I know.” Poison bared all his tiny teeth in his stupid little grin.

By now the grilled cheeses were but a fond memory, but the sun still beat down outside, a little past midday. Ghoul couldn’t remember the last time he’d been somewhere with actual air conditioning since Battery City, but walking from the shade of the truck stop and into the blistering desert was always a system shock. He thumbed up his collar where it stuck to his neck with sweat.

Inside the Trans Am, Poison turned on the radio. Cherri’s dulcet tones filled the cabin, but it wasn’t anything more than his poetry segment. His actual poetry segment, not the coded one written in limerick that detailed danger zones and drac positions.

“Oh, turn him up; I like this one,” Jet said, leaning forward from the back seat, propping his chin on Poison’s shoulder. Poison twisted his neck and tried to kiss him on the nose but couldn’t reach. Ghoul rolled his eyes and turned the radio up, and Poison gave up on trying to kiss his backseat passengers and shifted the car into gear.

“Let’s go to the garage,” Ghoul said. He jabbed Poison in the leg with the toe of his shoe. After sitting still in the truck stop for what felt like hours he found he was in the mood to cause some mischief. He could think of no better way to do that than chime into Cherri Cola’s show, which he broadcasted from the diner’s garage. Provided they didn't run into any dracs with syringes on the way there.

“You wanna annoy Cherri?” Jet asked. He stuck his head forward again, except on Ghoul’s side. He had to lean over Kobra to do it. In the rearview mirror, Ghoul saw a little smile tug at Kobra’s mouth.

“Hell yes,” Ghoul said. He feigned a whisper. “I’m gonna force Poison to sing show tunes.”

“Won’t have to force me to do anything,” Poison said. Show Pony was rubbing off on him. He yanked the wheel to the side to turn on to Route Guano, and Ghoul laughed as the momentum flung him against the door. He turned and kissed Jet on the nose, and Jet let him. Poison made a wordless, indignant squawk at being denied the famed affection of Jet Star.

“You let Ghoul kiss you and not me?” he said, pretending to be offended.

“You smell like peanut butter,” Jet said. Ghoul could have sworn he heard Kobra snort.

Cherri Cola finished his poem and Ghoul realized he hadn't been listening at all. He listened for the Cold Dead Hands riff that usually came between poems in the segment, but instead, there was a lull of silence that lasted about thirty seconds, filled only by the roll of the engine under their feet. Poison and Kobra’s foreheads wrinkled in the same concerned way.

“Where’s Cherri?” Ghoul asked, concern rising behind his mask. Poison leaned forward and twiddled the radio dial, even though there was only one good station in the zones. The rest were encrypted drac chatter.

Poison dialed the radio back to Dr. Death-Defying’s station. A burst of static came through the speakers, and he slowed down the car to listen. Cherri’s voice came crackling over the radio again. He spoke in limerick.

“Here’s to living like tumbleweeds, Sunshines.
Second zone from the unknown is where I need some colors to fly.

Right downwind from the sunset, flat
‘Bout a half step from the bat tracks.

If you’re on the motor wind, keep out an eye.”

The same static track played for a second or two, then Cherri repeated the limerick. He had a loop pedal he used to repeat his poems until they weren’t needed anymore. Poison turned down the radio and met Jet’s and Kobra’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“They’re on our boots,” Kobra said. Translated, Cherri’s limerick meant there were dracs about a half-mile out from where they were on Route Guano. If they were lucky they’d pass the haunt right by. Destroya knew they got lucky only during a clap, not before.

“Do we stop?” Jet asked.

“Cherri just said to keep an eye,” Ghoul said, taking his feet down off the dash. Cherri would have said something different if there were any zone runners in direct danger. He peered out the window as if the dracs would be out in the flatlands, right in the open. “He was probably talking to us.”

“Ten carbons they’ll jump us past the bluffs,” Ghoul said.

“Oh, obviously,” Poison said, not slowing down the car. Then he thought better of it and hit the brakes. “Fuck, do you think they spiked the road?”

“Likely,” Kobra said.

Poison peered through the windshield, even though it was useless. The asphalt rippled into heat waves ten feet in front of the car. By the time they saw the fabled road spikes, they’d be too late to stop. “No way I’m fuckin’ up my tires.”

“Our tires,” Ghoul corrected. Jet snorted.

The bluffs that marked the edge of Zone 4 swam into view. Ghoul was tempted to grumble, but it wouldn't get him anywhere. He stared sullenly out the window instead and did a mental calculation of how much "day off" they'd managed. He came up with four hours, at most. And that was counting Jet forcing his arm into a sling. He wasn’t quaked about it, though, just wished he had something more than his blaster to defend himself.

Poison slowed the Trans Am as they neared the bluffs, but stayed on the asphalt. He wouldn’t risk pulling off-road and kicking up too much dust until he had to. They moved at a crawl. Jet tightened the bandana around his mouth and nose; Kobra sat still but started radiating waves of cool fatal to mortal men who dared gaze upon him. Ghoul patted around on the dash for a rubber band. He made sure Jet wasn’t looking and slipped his sling from over his head, tossing it down into the footwell. No way he was fighting with one arm tied. His elbow cracked as he reached back to tie up his hair.

“You want a ponytail for the clap, Poison?” he offered. Poison shook his red head.

“I do need to do my roots, though,” he said, and flicked his wrist in a way that made Ghoul laugh.

“‘Cause it’s all about the glam,” Ghoul said. It wasn’t, but hell, it was a perk of the job. “I’ll do them for you once we get back to the diner; you always fuck ‘em up.”

Poison carded a hand self-consciously through his hair. “No I don’t,” he said.

“Guys,” Jet Star said.

Poison fixed his gaze back out the windshield. A second later he barked, “Fuck!” and slammed on the brakes. Ghoul was thrown forward in his seat, and not in a fun way. He braced himself against the dashboard to stop from braining himself on the windshield. Outside, laid across the cracked asphalt, there glinted a row of vicious tire-killers Ghoul had no idea how Poison had seen so fast.

“Fuck,” Ghoul agreed. He let out his breath in a rush, and it fogged against the glass in front of his face.

Poison turned off the engine and stowed the keys in his pocket. “See that ridge?” he asked. He pointed towards the rise of the bluffs, to a small, shadowy outcropping perfect for hiding. Ghoul, Kobra, and Jet nodded in unison. “Break for that, leave the car.” He waited for a moment, just long enough for the thrill of the fight to race through Ghoul as he dropped a hand to his hip, to the butt of his blaster.

Poison took a breath. He said, “Move.”

Ghoul pushed open his door and his soles bit dirt. He ran for the outcropping but kept his eyes peeled westward. He could have sworn he saw a flash of white before he skidded to a halt next to Kobra and crouched behind the outcropping. The wind kicked up and Ghoul tilted his ear, trying to catch something on it. All he could hear was the clatter and hum of radio equipment, but that and the road spikes were enough to tell him that dracs were haunting here, and they’d posted up recently. If he stretched his senses he could feel them like a stain in the waves of the desert.

“Kobra, I need a visual,” Poison said. Kobra nodded and pushed his sunglasses up his nose. He had a strategic way of creeping that evaded the eye, a way to move unnoticed. He stayed close to the slope of the bluff, always ready to melt out of sight. He dipped out of Ghoul’s sight, but returned a second later and crouched behind the outcropping, next to Poison’s leg.

“Van, no radio tower,” Kobra said. “Six-ish dracs, no scarecrow.”

“No scarecrow?” Poison asked. Kobra shook his head.

“Do they have syringes?” Ghoul asked.

“Not sure.”

Poison eyed the rise of the bluff, squinting against the sun. Ghoul could see the wheels turning in his brain. The bluff was too cumbersome to climb, too wide to reasonably loop around. Anything remotely strategic would be too much effort to put in for six dracs. But maybe Poison saw something Ghoul didn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time. He was born with that strategic eye software wired in his brain, and just enough crazy to see things no one else could.

“Six,” he said. “Can we take six?”

“Hell yeah we can take six,” Ghoul said.

Poison grinned. “Wavy,” he said. “Jet, you hung back last time, so… Kobra. Hang low?”

Kobra knocked a two-fingered salute off his forehead. He propped a knee in the sand, blaster pointed low. The kung-fu master ready to pounce, Ghoul thought.

“Ready?” Poison asked.

Jet and Ghoul said in unison, “Ready.”

“Let’s pull the pin, fuckers,” Poison said. “Vaminos.”

Ghoul drew his blaster and sprang out of his crouch, breaking from his cover and out into the beating sun. He and Jet ran on either side of Party Poison, and Ghoul strained his eyes to pick out the details of the haunt. Not a proper outpost—motorbikes and a single white van bursting with radio equipment. That was all he got before the shouts and zing of blaster charges knocked his ears cloudy, starting up tinnitus in his head.

The drac that had to have been on patrol squeezed off a shot that went right past Ghoul’s head. He zigzagged. Ghoul cursed and took aim. He let his eye ride the desert waves, surf the energy, and pulled the trigger.

He wasn’t as good a shot as Poison, not by far, but he hit the drac center mass. It staggered. It dropped the blaster it was holding and tripped in the sand, but not before it could shout a warning of “Killjoys!” Everything went to shit from there.

The dracs came from out and around the van, and Ghoul counted seven before they were surrounded. He heard Poison say, “Oh, fuck me,” before he, Ghoul, and Jet got caught up in the melee. Ghoul took a knee to the gut and went down, coughing, but Jet hauled him back to his feet by the collar of his jacket before disappearing into a mess of flying elbows. Ghoul jabbed the business end of his blaster into a white-clothed gut and fired. Two more dracs went down to his left—Poison.

He heard an oof from Poison’s direction, then, “Ghoul! Here!”

Ghoul whirled. One hulk of a drac had Poison under the arms, yanking him so harshly his kicking feet came off the ground. Another fumbled to reload its blaster. Poison caught his eye, went limp, and Ghoul shot both dracs. They puffed up sand, ghosted.

Ghoul met Poison’s eyes and saw them widen in shock as they fixed on something over Ghoul’s shoulder.

Ghoul turned to see the last drac standing behind him. It had lost its gun but was holding Jet Star in a chokehold under its arm. Jet struggled and kicked. What little Ghoul could see of his face flushed red. A vein stood out in his forehead. The drac held the point of a hypodermic needle to his neck.

“Put down the blasters or the rebel will be injected,” it said.

Poison let out his breath in a rush. “Shit,” he said. The chill of dread broke open like egg yolk and ran down Ghoul’s spine.

The drac tightened its grip around Jet’s neck. Jet choked under his bandana. He’d been cut in the melee, and blood oozed down the side of his face, bright where it splattered the drac’s uniform. Ghoul swore and thumbed the safety on his blaster, then dropped it in the sand. Poison did the same. Ghoul, though he was tempted, forced himself not to glance towards Kobra and give away his position.

“What’s in the syringe?” Poison asked, his voice dripping venom.

The drac’s red mask mouth seemed to grin. “You’d like to know,” it said. Jet’s struggles grew weaker, and his head lolled from lack of oxygen. The drac sunk the needle into his flesh and pressed.

Ghoul shouted, “No!” and threw himself at the draculoid, but the flash of a blaster charge dazzled in front of his face, and the drac was ghosted before it hit the ground. Ghoul was suddenly very glad Poison had ordered Kobra to stay back. Without him, Jet would… fuck. Jet Star.

Kobra came running, the end of his blaster smoking, and skidded to his knees next to Jet’s prone form. Poison dropped to the ground next to Ghoul, voice coming in a litany of curses. Kobra untied the bandana from around Jet’s face and held the flat of his hand under Jet’s nose. He let out a shaky sigh of relief. “He’s breathing,” he said. “Did they stick him?”

“Yeah,” Ghoul said. He held two fingers under Jet’s jaw, feeling the steady, regular throb of his pulse. “Come on, Jet,” he said. He felt like he was vibrating, twisting on the inside, having his organs rearranged. For all they knew that syringe could have been filled with fucking battery acid, and Jet could be ghosting right now. “You’re the medic, you need to be awake for this one.”

Poison shook him by the shoulder, and Jet’s brow crumpled. “Mm,” he said.

“Jet?” Kobra cradled Jet’s head with one hand and shielded his eyes with the other with surprising care. “Come on, Jet Star; come back.”

Jet moaned and squeezed his eyes shut against the sun. “Kobra?” he rasped.

“It’s me,” Kobra said. “Give me your hands.”

Jet stretched his arms out blindly, and Kobra took him by the forearms and hauled him up to a sitting position. Jet pried his eyes open, squinting down at his lap. Then he doubled over, coughing, sucking in air like his throat had constricted to the size of a drinking straw. Kobra set a hand on his back.

“Fuck,” Jet managed. He sounded like he’d swallowed glass, but that was to be expected for someone who’d just been choked half to dust. “What happened?”

“They stuck you,” Poison said.

Jet peered at him. “What?”

“A drac with a syringe. It got you.”

Jet blinked slowly. “Oh,” he said. He opened and closed his fists. “Am I okay?”

Ghoul almost laughed. “We’re supposed to be asking you that,” he said. He ducked his head and caught Jet’s eye. Jet’s gaze was squinty, but not glassy, and it didn't appear as though his organs were shutting down, which Ghoul supposed was good.

“I think I’m okay,” Jet said. He swept his gloved hand through the sand, looking concerned. “Where’s the… uh…”

“Syringe?”

“Yeah,” Jet said. “I wanna take it to Pony.”

“Let me find it,” Kobra said. “You stand up.”

Ghoul and Poison each got a hand under Jet’s arm and hauled him to his feet. Jet swayed but found his balance. Ghoul made him stoop, though, so he could take Jet’s face in his hands and watch his pupils dilate. They looked fine, but that wasn’t to say they wouldn’t look fine in five minutes.

“Your hair looks funny,” Jet said. “Y’oughta let me braid it sometime.”

“Shut up,” Ghoul said. “Are you dizzy?”

Jet shook his head, taking Ghoul’s hands with it. “I’m ‘choked out’ dizzy,” he rasped. “Don’t feel anything from this yet.” He brought a hand up to his neck. His middle finger came away smeared with nothing more dramatic than a teardrop of blood. Ghoul let him go and Jet wiped his hand on his jeans.

“We’ll just have to see, Ghoul,” Jet said.

Ghoul scoffed. “How come you’re the calm one about this?”

“I’m not calm,” Jet said, matter-of-factly. “I wouldn’t want our fearless leader to come down in a faint, though.”

“That was one time,” Poison said.

Jet mouthed, Three times, and Ghoul had to cover his mouth to suppress his laugh. There were times when Poison’s ego needed bruising, but not now.

Kobra came up victorious with the syringe in his fist. He slipped it into his pocket for safekeeping. “Anything, Jet?”

“I’m milkshakes,” Jet said. Everyone looked at him, concerned, and he fidgeted under the pressure of three killjoy gazes. “Guys, I’m fine,” he said. Ghoul heard him laying his reassuring voice on thick, the kind he used when someone was broken or bleeding. “You’re ignoring we’ve got a perfectly good van full of equipment we can take back to Dr. Death. When he and Show Pony get back, Pony can look at me.”

His words shook something loose inside Poison. He drew himself up, recovering his fearless leader posture. “And he can’t look at you if we’re not there.” He nodded, sealing the issue. “Alright,” he said. “Kobra, come with me. We’ll load up the road spikes and take the car. Ghoul and Jet take the van, go ahead of us.”

Ghoul was off before Poison finished speaking, dragging Jet in his wake. It had been a long time since he’d hijacked a car, and he felt the anticipation as a tingle in his fingertips. He probably wouldn’t have to hotwire it, but a girl could dream. Jet hopped in the back, pulling the gaping doors closed behind him, and Ghoul jumped in the driver’s seat. He fucking hated these things—hated every BL/ind vehicle. The interior was fluorescent white enough to give him a headache. Made him feel like he could bleed all his color out from his nose after a while inside. The only fun that came from driving them was the hijacking part.

Ghoul couldn’t lie that he wasn’t a little disappointed when he saw the keys dangling from the ignition. Jet jumped into the passenger’s seat and snickered at Ghoul when he had to fuck with the seat so his feet could reach the pedals.

“Stop fucking laughing,” Ghoul grumbled.

Jet snorted and covered his mouth with his hand. “I’m not,” he said.

“Right,” Ghoul said. He adjusted the mirrors and watched Poison and Kobra scrambling to uproot the road spikes and load them into the back of the Trans Am. They tried to take everything they could from haunts; drac stuff was invaluable and so easy to turn against its owners.

Poison fired up the engine and started down Route Guano again, and Ghoul was close behind. Jet fiddled with the radio but had no luck with it. He instead busied himself poking around at the buttons on the unfamiliar dashboard. There was no cassette tape player—obviously, music was outlawed in Battery City—but there were plenty of other buttons and dials. Jet twisted one out of curiosity, and cold air came blowing from the vent in the dashboard.

Ghoul almost crashed the car.

“Air conditioning!” he squawked. “In a car!”

“No way,” Jet said. He was caught off guard and his voice sounded more like a wheeze. He leaned up to the dash on his side, twiddling with the vent as if he could convince it to give up its secrets. “This is my car now,” he said.

“You’d want to drive around this monstrosity?” Ghoul asked, and shuddered.

“I’d spray paint your face on the hood first,” Jet said. He kicked his feet up on the dash. Compared to the utter absence of color the red leather looked shocking, the soles garish in the best way possible. Ghoul searched his face for any sign of discomfort, for ill effects of the injection. Jet noticed.

“I’m fine, Ghoul,” he said. “Watch the road.”

Ghoul stuck out his tongue but did as he was told. Jet would be fine, at least until they got back to the diner. Then Pony could take a look at him once he and Dr. Death got back from whatever they were doing in Zone 2. They’d be fine.

Chapter Text

Ghoul nearly gave Cherri Cola a heart attack, driving past the diner and radio station in a drac van. He came running out into the sand, blasters in both hands, sword at his hip, green jacket flapping open, and shot out Ghoul’s tires before he could say, “Fuck.” Jet ducked, throwing an arm above his head. Ghoul flung open the door and scrambled out, holding up his palms, making sure to flash his yellow striped sleeves. Jet was close behind. “Cherri! It’s us. No fire.”

Cherri swore and dropped his blasters back to his hip, thumbing on the safeties. “Destroya, Ghoul,” he said, sagging. “Warn me next time so I don’t fuckin’ pumpkin you.” Cherri knocked a knuckle against the top of Ghoul’s head for emphasis, mimicking the headshot he could have taken. Then he pretended to listen to Ghoul’s skull like he was knocking around on a wall looking for a stud. “Hm, nobody home,” he said. Ghoul shoved him.

Poison pulled up the Trans Am and put her in park, and he and Kobra got out. Poison eyed the slowly emptying front tires of their new BL/ind radio van and looked back to Cherri. “You shot out their tires?”

“Like you wouldn’t shoot at a BL/ind van coming straight for your garage,” he said. He beckoned with the business end of his blaster. “Come in. Is that van from the haunt in Zone 4?”

“Yeah,” Poison said. “We took it down, but that’s what we need to talk to you about-”

“Talk inside,” Cherri said. “I need to stop the poem loop I have going.”

They filed into the garage that Dr. Death and Show Pony had turned into a broadcasting powerhouse. Drac satellite dishes attached to the roof pointed skyward and in circles, casting Cherri's words out into the desert. There were about three thousand metal coat hangers stringing everything together and extending antennas up there. Ghoul sometimes felt like a misplaced breath would send the whole thing splintering into shards of metal, but so far it hadn’t happened.

Ghoul brought up the rear and let the door swing shut behind him. Cherri sat in his swivel chair and twiddled the dials on his soundboard. He held up a finger and leaned in close to his microphone, spoke a few rhythmic lines about how not to worry, the Fabulous Killjoys snipped the haunt and were safe back between the airwaves.

“Will you let me do a bit, Cherri?” Poison asked, propping his elbow on Cherri’s shoulder. He made his eyes big and stuck his lip out, trying his damndest to be cute. “Please?”

Cherri grinned. “Later, you fuckin’ sand baby,” he said. He turned to Dr. Death’s microphone again. “Alright, tumbleweeds, I’m gone off the rocks and the poetry’s on pause. Keep your ears on. Next up I got some deep cuts from Raw Nerve.” He flicked through his box of tapes and pushed one into the cassette player. Once he hit play he whirled around in his chair, hands folded in his lap, face easy like it always was. “Sit down, you’re making me nervous.”

Poison parked his ass on the table, folding up his legs and pushing his mask up to his forehead like it was a pair of sunglasses. Ghoul picked a piece of floor that looked comfy and sat down criss-cross-applesauce. Jet sat down on the crate amp in the corner and Kobra leaned next to him. Kobra only ever leaned.

“So what happened at the haunt?” Cherri asked. His real people voice was softer than his radio voice, but no less fetching. Ghoul could listen to him talk all day. He’d always been just a little in love with Cherri Cola, just like everyone who listened to the radio.

Poison cut right to the chase. “Jet got poked with some drac syringe,” he said.

Cherri leaned forward, bracing his bent elbows on his knees, lacing his fingers together. “He what now?”

“Some drac injected me with something,” Jet said. He thumbed the collar of his jacket away from his neck, showing Cherri the pinprick where the mystery drug had been shot into his system.

Kobra took the syringe out of his pocket, holding it on his flat palm. “Here’s the syringe,” he said.

Cherri took it and held it up to the light, his eyebrows pulling together. “Guys, this is an earthquake,” he said. “We need Pony for this one. How long ago did you get shot up?”

“However long it took us to drive from the haunt to here,” Jet said. “Half hour, maybe.”

Cherri ran a hand back through his hair, making it stick up in little pink spikes where he had it dyed in the front. “You need Pony,” he said. “I’m sorry, they’ll know better than me."

"I really feel fine," Jet Star said, trying to be reassuring. It almost worked.

"Yeah," said Cherri. "That's why I'm worried. Should I radio Dr. Death?”

“Won’t he be back tomorrow?” Jet said.

Cherri nodded. “Doesn’t mean I can’t get him and Pony here now,” he said.

Ghoul, on reflex, looked to Poison. Poison fixed his gaze on Jet. “It’s your choice,” he told him. “I’d call Pony, but you’re the one who got bit.”

Jet fidgeted with his gloves, deep in thought. Kobra reached over and held the back of his hand to Jet’s forehead, then took his pulse again. “You do seem okay,” he said.

“I don’t feel different,” Jet said. “I don’t know, maybe we should just give it a day. If it was an intramuscular injection it should have taken effect by now. Maybe it was nothing. Or I’m immune.”

Ghoul smiled at him. “Nerd,” he said. He didn’t care what Jet said about himself, he was a damn good medic. He practically sponged up the technical stuff he learned in passing from Pony. Pretty soon he’d be a walking encyclopedia of field medicine without Pony having to lift a finger.

“If you say so, doc,” Cherri said, wearing a similar expression to Ghoul’s. “I have Pony on speed-dial.”

Jet tried a smile, and it looked small but genuine. Ghoul kept him in the corner of his eye, but if Jet wanted to wait, they were going to wait. Hell, maybe swish up the dregs of Poison’s day off.

***

They hung around in the garage for a while, listening to Cherri spin Raw Nerve until Poison got tired of listening and pestered Cherri to let him talk. While he was distracted, Ghoul stood up and stole his sitting spot, because his ass was going numb from sitting on the floor. If Poison snoozed, he fuckin’ loozed.

Cherri finally ceded, and he had to begin Poison’s segment with a disclaimer, which made Ghoul howl with laughter. Poison did no good acting like Cherri or Dr. Death, but he found his voice after a bit. He told a few stories and talked in his best code to get the word out about the dracs with syringes, looking to Cherri for approval. Cherri gave him a thumbs up and a signature grin and Poison lit up.

Destroya knew it was impossible for Poison to run out of things to talk about, so Kobra had to stage an intervention. He had this dry way of telling jokes that he could worm into any situation and sent Ghoul into stitches every time. When he and Poison were together he was in rare form. Ghoul thought he might have to leave the room before he fainted from laughing so hard.

Cherri eventually succeeded in stealing back the microphone when Poison was distracted. He’d managed to keep a modicum of composure, but that was because of his unflappable deejay DNA.

"Sure you don't want me to call Dr. Death?" he said after they’d all calmed down.

"I'll wait till tomorrow morning," Jet said, nodding, more sure of himself.

"All right," Cherri said. He made to kick up his feet on the table and Ghoul squawked when he saw his boots swinging straight for his lap. He stood up before he could get kicked or immobilized by those steel-toed monsters.

Cherri smiled at them. "Now get out of my garage," he said amicably. "Do Poison's hair or something. I can see roots."

"Fuck off," Poison said. He flattened a hand over the top of his head. “Are they really that bad?”

Cherri Cola just grinned and waved them away. It wasn’t as if they were going far. Maybe ten feet to the left to reach the diner’s door. They kicked off their boots at the door and Poison’s piss socks made a reappearance. With the clap and all Ghoul had almost forgotten how repulsive they were. He was violently reminded, though.

“I’m going to burn those socks,” Ghoul said. He placed Poison in the kitchen, made him sit on an empty Power Pup box near the sink so he could access the top of his head.

“You’ll have to pry them off my corpse,” Poison said.

Kobra materialized from parts unknown, Show Pony’s medical bag in one hand and tube of poison red hair dye in the other. He toted an unenthusiastic Jet in his wake.

“You’re overreacting, Kobes,” Jet said.

“You’re bleeding,” Kobra said. He pointed at the counter. “Sit.”

Poison, who had been behaving himself suspiciously well, said, “Ooh, Kobra, I love it when you get all bossy.”

Kobra’s nostrils flared. At least Poison’s self-preservation instinct was in order because he pressed his lips together tight and very much did not giggle. Or so Ghoul thought. No sooner was he false-whispering, “My big brother license means I can fuck with him all I want.”

“Poison–” Kobra said, his tone a warning of imminent wrath.

Jet, the angel amongst men, intervened. “Hey, Kobra, my head really does hurt. I can’t possibly stitch myself up in this condition,” he said, shooting a look at Poison like, The things I do for you. “Help me?”

The little smile that fell to Kobra’s face seemed to take even him by surprise. His, “Fuck off,” was unintentionally directed sweetly at Jet, who angled his bloody face to the light and sat still while Kobra peeled off his gloves and started unraveling some dental floss. It was always cheap and good to stitch with.

Ghoul turned to Poison, who was trying to snake his disgusting foot around Ghoul’s ankle. Ghoul kicked at his toes. “Do you want your hair done or not?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” Poison said.

“Then get your piss socks six feet away from my face.”

Poison saluted, snickering at himself. Fucker thought he was a comedian. Ghoul took off his gloves, grabbing the middle finger of each between his teeth and dropping them on the counter next to Jet. He resisted asking if he was all right. Jet would give him an exasperated yes no matter how many times he asked.

He kept his friend in the corner of his eye as he rolled up his sleeves and assessed Poison’s hair—unwashed, flippy as ever. He ran his hands through it and fluffed all the sand out of it before getting to work.

Kobra finished his clean line of stitches on Jet’s hairline long before Ghoul was done working dye into Poison’s head. He and Jet sat on the counter nearby, picking at a can of Power Pup and grimacing. Jet looked a million times better without all the blood on his face, although there was a nasty ring of bruises starting to color around his windpipe.

“I can’t eat this shit and a Johnny Darko grilled cheese on the same day,” Jet said, holding up a suspicious glob speared on his fork. “I feel Destroya looking down on me in disgust.”

“I don’t think Destroya would care about dog food,” Poison said. He had his eyes closed in satisfaction, surrendering his precious hair to Ghoul as he examined his bleach job. Not bad if he said so himself. He could irreparably fuck up Poison’s hair with how much he was trusting him. He wouldn’t. But he could. An image came to his mind of Party Poison with a mullet like Show Pony's, and he snickered to himself.

“He doesn’t eat, you know,” Poison said. Ghoul put a glob of red in his hand, working it over his fingers and into the hair near Poison’s scalp. His hands would be red for a week after this, but he didn’t care too much.

“Yes, because he’s a robot,” Ghoul said.

“Robots could eat,” Jet said.

“Since when are you an expert on robot cuisine?” Ghoul asked.

“Since forever,” Jet shot back. “I’m not sayin’ he eats food.” He held up another viscous forkful of Power Pup. “Or whatever this shit is. Maybe he eats souls.”

“That’s not very nice of him,” Kobra commented. Jet snorted and knocked an elbow against Kobra’s.

“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” Jet said. Ghoul’s hands stilled as he waited for him to continue, and Poison made a noise of complaint, pushing his face into Ghoul’s shirt. Ghoul made an exasperated noise and kept going. “Y’know how Destroya was too big to power so BL/ind abandoned the project? What if when you’re dust the Phoenix Witch can take your soul and you can choose to power Destroya.”

“And that’s why he would ‘know’ to wake up,” Kobra said. “If there are enough zone runner souls out there to power him then something pretty Costa Rica must have happened. Comes when he’s needed most, you know?”

Ghoul and Poison said, “Hm,” at the same time. Ghoul felt Poison hum more than he heard it.

“Makes sense,” Ghoul said. He kind of liked that idea, that he could come back to the desert after he was dust and fight when he was most needed. Also, he could power a giant badass robot. “He could also just be waiting for the right people.”

“Maybe,” Jet said. He swung his feet, bumping his heels against the cabinet below him. “It’s a nice thought. I’d like to be Destroya juice.”

Kobra snickered. He pinched his nose and in a mocking voice so similar to Poison’s it was scary, said, “I drink juice when I’m killing ‘cause it’s fuckin’ delicious.”

Poison slouched even further as if he was small enough to hide in Ghoul, disappear from the ridiculous shit he used to say on the regular. He groaned and poked his pointy nose into the soft flesh of Ghoul’s stomach. “Cover my ears, Ghoul, he’s bothering me,” he said.

Ghoul flicked him on the ear—the only part of his face he could reach, leaving a red smear of dye. “Did you lose your hands or something?”

“Left ‘em in the car,” Poison said. Ghoul held him up for as long as he felt the dye needed to make Poison’s head visible from outer space, then helped him rinse it out in the sink. It ran down the drain like blood’s nicer cousin. Poison made Ghoul do all the work, but Ghoul didn’t mind. He always liked doing Poison’s hair. It made him feel like all was right with the world, or something.

Chapter Text

That night, Ghoul looked through the window to see rainclouds darkening on the horizon, gathering as if piling up against a huge window. He cursed. If he was forced to admit one thing he missed about Battery City, it would be rain. Clean rain, if not real. The city was climate-controlled, rain hashed on a monthly basis. Of his few, scattered memories his favorites were those of rain—watching it skitter down square window panes, the way the city barely smelled like battery acid afterward. In the zones, the rain was acidic, and it burned worse than the sun. What they collected in barrels outside the diner had to be purified with iodine before it was safe to use. You didn’t go out in a storm unless you had to. Then you’d end up burned like a wavehead. In the desert, clouds meant foreboding.

Ghoul bashed out through the screen door, and a second later barged in on Cherri, who started and choked on the gator he was drinking out of a tin can. They looked at each other for a moment. Ghoul looked at the green drink—Poison’s favorite color.

“Don’t tell Poison,” Cherri said.

Ghoul mimed zipping his lips shut. He pointed at the windowless wall of the garage. “Rain’s coming.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah shit,” Ghoul said.

“Guess I’m a weatherman now,” Cherri said, swirling his drink around. “How’s Jet?”

“Milkshakes,” Ghoul said. It sounded flat even to his ears.

“Right,” Cherri said. “Damn. I told Dr. Death to get Pony here tonight, but…”

Ghoul sighed. “Probably not a good idea.”

Silence fell, and Cherri’s mouth wrinkled. For a moment the only sound in the garage was the hum of radio equipment. “I’m worried about him,” he said.

“Me too,” Ghoul said. Thunder rumbled like Destroya’s distant footsteps outside.

Cherri waved him towards the door. “Go keep an eye on him. You're the only one I trust to look after the love of my life."

Ghoul snorted. "Poison can spit farther than you trust me."

"Hm, you're right," Cherri said. "Forget that. I trust Kobra."

The image came to Ghoul’s mind of how careful Kobra always was with Jet, how he'd stroked Jet's hair when he cleaned his wound with careful drops of alcohol, and Ghoul couldn't help but agree. No matter how much he denied it Kobra was a secret softie under those sunglasses.

Ghoul left the garage and slid the diner door lock into place behind him. Before he got his boots off at the door Poison shouted from the other side of the diner, “It’s gonna rain.” He sounded smushed, and Ghoul could picture him pressing his face against the window, watching the clouds gather.

“I just told Cherri,” Ghoul said, shrugging off his jacket and flinging it into the booth on top of Jet Star’s. He was about to head for their room but backpedaled halfway there and picked up their old deck of cards. He was in the mood to crush Poison at a game of Watch Me.

“Circle up, fucks,” Ghoul said as he entered their room. Normally they had their cots in a line all facing the little window, but when it was time for cards they pushed Kobra and Poison’s together. They sat on them in a little clump with just enough room in the circle of knocking knees for a pool to fish from or surface on which to display their hands.

Ghoul took an assessment of Jet with a totally not-suspicious glance. He looked fine, soft around the edges without his jacket and tight waxed jeans. The knot of unease in Ghoul’s chest refused to unravel, though. He swore he could feel something coming like he could sense the rain marching closer. He wished Show Pony was here.

Although the last thing he wanted to do now was sit still, he sat through a few rounds of Watch Me. It was as if halfway between the kitchen and their room he'd lost the taste for the game. His pumpkin wasn’t in it, and Kobra beat him by miles. Jet by a slightly smaller amount of miles. It was almost a relief when real night—Phoenix Witch night—fell, and it got too dark in the room to see the cards, so Kobra stacked and returned them to their drawer.

“Should we do the perimeter?” Kobra asked. As if summoned by his voice, the rain started drumming its tap-sizzle on the windowpane and sheet metal roof.

“I’m not worried,” Poison said. “No one’s fried enough to come out in this weather.”

Kobra shrugged in a way that meant he agreed, and Ghoul watched his pointy silhouette fold itself neatly into his cot. Ghoul lay and stared at the ceiling. It took him about thirty seconds to realize that all he was going to do tonight was tumble and listen to nearby Poison’s soft breathing and the sound of the toxic rain.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to fall asleep. If he did, tomorrow would come faster and so would Pony and Dr. Death. He said the Scarecrow rhyme in his head and that helped a little. He nodded fitfully off after the second, “Love won’t stop this bomb.”

What felt like a blink later he was awake again, feeling sustainably pissy. He had to have slept for a little while, though, because Jet had moved. He’d dragged his cot across the floor and situated himself in front of the window. He sat with his limbs all twisted up in a ball, resting his head on his bent knees and watching the rain. Ghoul made sure Poison and Kobra were still sleeping before standing up. His socked feet made no sound on the linoleum and Jet didn’t notice him approach. Ghoul didn’t touch him, rather whispered, “Blackbird,” to catch his attention.

“Hi,” Jet said. His whisper was like sandpaper, and Ghoul felt a twinge of sympathy.

“Can’t sleep,” Ghoul said.

“Me neither. C’mere.”

Ghoul sat next to Jet on his cot, letting his feet hang off the edge. He peered outside, at the desert he was almost sure would wash away one of these days. “Thinkin’?” he asked Jet.

“Nah.” Jet knocked a knuckle against the side of his head. “You know me: vacant.” He hesitated. “Feel like I got pumpkined though.”

Ghoul looked at him, and couldn’t see much else besides his silhouette, the outline of his strong nose and curly hair. “You think it’s the drac stuff?”

Jet shrugged. “Hope not,” he said, rubbing his temples. “It’s bad enough that I can’t sleep, though.”

Ghoul took his hands out of his lap and held out an arm. “Gimmie,” he said.

“What?”

“Gimmie your poor widdle head,” Ghoul said. “Let’s look at the stars.”

Jet looked at him, and his eyes, at least, Ghoul could see in the dark. “You know the lights in the sky aren’t really stars.”

Ghoul hushed him. He didn’t care that Jet looked at him funny. He’d had a shit day, and Ghoul was going to be nice to him whether he liked it or not. Thankfully Jet didn’t put up a fight. He laid his head in Ghoul’s lap, and Ghoul smiled to himself at Jet’s sigh of contentment.

“Didn’t you make up some constellations one time?” Jet asked.

Ghoul ran his hands through Jet’s hair, thinking. “Yeah. Forgot ‘em, though. I’ll make up some new ones.” He peered through the window up at the sky and found a shape he liked. “See the big ass blue one?”

Jet hummed.

“Go two left of that and there’s the mailbox.”

Jet considered the sky. “It’s kind of a square,” he said. “Could be the diner, too.”

Ghoul picked out another shape. “There’s Poison… no. That’s Kobra, he has no ass.”

Jet giggled and brought his hand up to his mouth to stifle the sound, but it dissolved into full-blown laughter. His bruised throat made it into a weird, raspy snort thing that set Ghoul off too. They laughed and shushed each other in the dark, trying not to wake up Poison and Kobra. It took Ghoul a while to get a breath in, and much longer than that to stop laughing entirely. He turned his eyes to the sky again.

“That one there. Oh, that’s an android girl,” Ghoul said. “And the one right next to it is a bunch of bees.”

Jet snorted. “Bees,” he said. “Let me find one.”

He went silent for a minute, and Ghoul sat and watched the rain while he looked. A minute dragged by without Jet speaking up.

“Find anything?” Ghoul asked.

Jet didn’t respond. Ghoul bent his head to look at him and found his eyes closed, lips parted, nose smushed against Ghoul’s knee. Very much asleep.

Ghoul smiled. “Night, Jet,” he said.

***

Ghoul peeled open his eyes and was met with a face full of Jet’s hair.

Light seeped in through the window, and the rain had stopped sometime in the night. Ghoul peered outside to see the ground already sapped dry by the heat. The sun was just barely up, bleeding along the horizon. He picked up Poison’s shoe off the floor and flung it at him. The toe hit him square in the stomach, a fucking perfect shot, and he went oof, awake in a second.

“Fuck you, whoever,” he groaned.

“Ghoul,” Ghoul supplied.

“Fuck you, Ghoul,” Poison amended.

“Rain stopped,” Ghoul said.

Poison went, “Rrr,” and swung his feet from his cot. His knees cracked when he stood up and made his way over to Jet, who was facedown on his cot, still out cold. Well, about half of his body was actually on the cot. He had a leg and an arm thrown over the side from where he’d scooted over to give Ghoul more room.

Poison shook him by the heel. “Wakey wakey, Jet,” he said. Jet barely moved.

Kobra materialized at Jet’s side and crouched. “Jet Star,” he said. Jet groaned, and not in a good-natured, five-more-minutes kind of way, either. Ghoul’s blood went cold when Jet’s hand went to his neck.

“Yeah, what?” Jet said. He sat up, squinting, and Ghoul stared. From the injection site, deep, purple, bruise colored veins spiderwebbed in sharp relief up his neck and jaw, disappearing into his hairline and reaching up as far as his cheekbones. As Ghoul watched, they receded, fading back to Jet’s normal olive skin tone as if nothing had happened.

“What the fuck,” Kobra said. He shared a worried glance with Poison and Ghoul, and Jet squinted in confusion.

“Mik-” Jet said, then looked horrified. “Kobra,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“You don’t look too good,” Kobra said. Jet looked even more confused.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked. His eyes looked glassy, and his neck was well and truly bruised now. He looked like hell.

“It’s the injection,” Ghoul said. “Has to be.”

“Injection?” Jet said.

“We gotta get you to Pony,” Poison said.

Jet brushed his hair out of his face. “Okay,” he said. “Where… are they?”

Ghoul must have looked at him like he grew a second head because his shoulders went up in defense. “Are they in the garage?”

“They’re in Zone 2, Jet,” Kobra said. “With Dr. Death. Remember?”

“Oh!” Jet said. He looked horrified with himself. “Fuck, sorry, yeah. Why did I forget that?”

“‘Cause you’re drugged,” Ghoul said, feeling a pit drop open in his stomach. It was too much to hope they would skid past this one, he knew that, but that didn’t mean he had to be happy that they hadn’t.

Jet’s hand went to his neck again. “Fuck me,” he said. “It happened yesterday, right?”

“Yeah,” Poison said.

“We were in… We were here? Zone 3?”

“Four,” Ghoul said. “We went to the truck stop.”

Jet swore. “Right,” he said. “Fuck.” Then a crash sounded from the other end of the diner and Ghoul startled, his hand going to his hip before realizing he didn’t have his blaster on him. He didn’t need it though; it was just Cherri in the door, looking… shit, looking serious.

“Pony and Dr. D need you in Zone 2,” he said.

Poison’s face hardened. “When?”

“Yesterday,” Cherri said. “Bring all your shit; they’re haunted and they need backup.” A second later he was gone, bashing back out the door to wrangle the radio.

All eyes turned to Jet.

“I’m okay,” Jet said, standing. “Let’s move.”

“You’re not steady enough for a clap,” Poison said.

“I’m fuckin' milkshakes,” Jet said, shouldering past Poison to grab his boots. When no one moved, still watching him, he turned around, huffed in exasperation, and said, “I’m driving if you can’t get your asses in gear.”

That was enough to shock Poison into movement. “You wouldn’t dare-” he said, diving for his pants.

Ghoul got dressed automatically, never once taking his eyes off Jet Star. There was something seriously wrong with him; he was a shadow of the person he’d been yesterday, and Ghoul expected him to keel over at any moment. His only consolation was that they were heading to Pony, probably a lot faster than Pony would have gotten to them. He didn’t like putting all his charges in the same gun like this, but none of them knew anyone better.

"Ghoul, mask!" Poison said. Ghoul reached up and caught the flying thing with one hand. Boots laced and jackets zipped, they were out the door in less than a minute. Jet didn't stumble once, but a tic stood out in his jaw and his cheeks blanched in the sun. Ghoul didn't have the luxury to stop and worry about him. He skidded into his workshop and fixed his belt of grenades about his waist, strapped his blaster to his thigh, and shouldered his kit. That was all he had time for before he heard Poison rev the engine. He came rumbling past Ghoul's garage and Kobra cracked open the back door for him. He jumped inside while the car was still moving and Poison gunned it.

The whole way to Zone 2 Ghoul stole worried glances at Jet in the mirrors.

Chapter Text

The dracs shot before the killjoys did. A sleek, smoking rocket came whistling towards them, and Poison shouted “Fuck!” and slammed on the brakes, nearly flipping the Trans Am as he tried to grind it to a halt. The rocket exploded in the road right in front of them. Ghoul felt the boom in his chest. The one day he didn't bring the fucking rocket launcher was the one day they needed it. Go figure.

They scrambled out of the car on the driver's side, hitting the dirt and using the Trans Am as terrible, brightly colored defilade. Another rocket screamed overhead but hit over its target. The impact was still enough to spray sand in Ghoul's face, and he threw up an arm to shield his eyes. He waited, gritting his teeth, for another to come and hit its mark, but time drew on and nothing else came except the fizzle of blaster shots. Ghoul could barely hear.

Poison gave Kobra and Jet the signal to stay down, and he and Ghoul sat up to peer through the Trans Am windows and assess the situation.

Cherri was right when he said it was a monster of a haunt. It was a goddamn haunted house. The dracs were set up in what was left of the Zone 2 novac. “Novac” wasn’t the real name, Ghoul was sure, but none of them had a better way to describe what the building was. Kind of an apartment complex, but only one level and shaped like an L. The sign outside was missing a few letters and read “novac,” so that’s what they called it. The dracs had set up a radio tower Ghoul itched to get his hands on. He counted six motorbikes and five dracs running straight for the Trans Am. No sign of Dr. Death-Defying or Show Pony.

Ghoul armed a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw. “Fire!” he shouted, and he, Poison, Jet, and Kobra clapped their hands over their ears. The explosion punched up through the ground and into the soles of Ghoul’s boots.

“Ghoul, Kobra, on me,” Poison shouted. “Jet, stay down. We’ll get you after we clear the novac.”

Ghoul caught half of Jet’s indignant, “What the-” before he was running. He usually had Jet to cover him, but he didn’t care. He could cover his damn self. Jet was in no condition for a clap and Ghoul would rather be undefended than risk Jet being ghosted because he couldn’t remember who they were supposed to be looking for.

Two dracs were still upright after Ghoul’s grenade. He took aim, but before he could fire a charge came whizzing by to his left, and he looked to see Jet Star running into the firefight, the end of his blaster smoking. Poison shot the other drac and while leading them in a dead sprint towards the novac, rounded on Jet.

“I told you to stay the fuck back and take fucking cover!” he said.

“And let you get killed?” Jet fired back. “You’re not getting ghosted without me.”

Ghoul caught sight of something bright yellow and squinted through the dust. If that was… it was. “Dr. Death’s van, dead ahead,” Ghoul said. Poison’s head whipped around from glaring daggers at Jet to peer through the dust.

“Take cover at the wall,” Poison said. Ghoul caught glimpses of white figures emerging from the western side of the novac and kicked it into high gear. He hit the wall hard, pressing his back flat against the brickwork. Jet came in at his right, clutching his blaster and breathing hard through his teeth.

“You fucking idiot,” Ghoul hissed at him. “You should have stayed back. You didn’t see yourself this morning, you had these veins and shit-”

Jet fixed him with a look so dark it made Ghoul choke mid-sentence. “Shut the fuck up, Ghoul,” he said, and the malice in his voice made Ghoul take a step back in shock. That wasn’t like Jet at all. That was fucking scary, in a way he never knew Jet to be. He could get intense, maybe, but never so cold.

Poison’s eyes went wide, too. He gave his order staring at Jet like he’d never seen him before. In a way, Ghoul supposed, he hadn’t. Jet fell silent but seething, sporting a demeanor disturbingly similar to Korse's.

“Uh,” Poison began. Blaster charges flew by. He pressed himself back against the wall as they took out chunks of brick inches away from Jet’s shoulder. “Fuck. Ghoul, you and Kobra run for the van, me and Jet will cover you.”

Ghoul side-eyed Jet Star, not too sure if he wanted to put his life in the hands of this new, scary Not-Jet. But Jet was already kneeling, reloading his blaster. Poison had a sharp eye on him, too. Ghoul knew this was the best option. He’d just have to risk it.

“On three?” Kobra asked, rising on the balls of his feet, ready to run.

“No,” Ghoul said, and stepped into the fray. The dracs were on them in an instant. Arm thrown out, Ghoul shot blindly to his right as he ran for all he was worth. He wasn’t sure whether the dracs dropping beside him were because of his shooting or Poison and Jet’s. A shot clipped Ghoul’s leg, and the shock of it made him stumble. Then a grip closed around his ankle and he ate shit. He cursed and shot at the drac in the sand behind him and scrambled to his feet in time to see Kobra pull off a spectacular flying kick that sent two dracs down. Ghoul ghosted them and sprinted the last few yards and skidded to shelter behind Dr. Death’s van. Kobra was close behind. Ghoul took a moment to thank the fucking Phonenix Witch; he was alive.

“Where the fuck is D?” Kobra shouted, over the ringing impacts of blaster charges on the van.

“Right behind you.” Ghoul jumped half out of his skin when the van door behind him slid open, ready to shoot. But it was only Dr. Death-Defying, radio receiver in one hand and blaster in the other.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Ghoul said.

“Nice to see you, too, Ghoulie,” Dr. Death said, maneuvering his wheelchair out onto the ground. “Waiting for you to roll up. Where’s Party and the Jet?”

“Coming,” Kobra said. He leaned out from behind the van, breaking his cover for a second to give the okay sign to Poison and Jet. Ghoul took a knee next to him and started shooting. The dracs concentrated their fire on them, and Ghoul, Dr. Death, and Kobra laid down a sheet of covering fire. Whatever Scarecrow that had to be inside the novac had dracs stationed in the windows and on the roof. Ghoul managed to pick off two before Poison and Jet came skidding into cover, wired but unharmed.

Poison, hand over his head, breathing hard, grinned. “Hi, Dr. Death,” he said. “Where’s Pony?”

“Black and white,” Dr. Death said.

Ghoul’s jaw dropped open. “They’re in a fucking body bag?”

“Easy, Ghoulie,” Dr. Death said. “They went out for recon when we got here and played ghost when we realized we were in over our pumpkins. They know to stay put until we go get ‘em.”

Ghoul let out a sigh of relief. “Destroya,” he said, dragging a hand down his face, feeling sand grit between his fingers. “Don’t scare me like that.”

Dr. Death chuckled. “Sorry,” he said, lifting himself up to peer through the van windows. “We got enough to be scared of what with that other rocket launcher.”

“Other rocket launcher?”

The hollow thud of something big-barreled firing sounded from beyond the van. Ghoul had exactly enough time to look at Poison and see his eyes widen behind his mask before he heard the whistle. They each grabbed a handle of Dr. Death’s wheelchair and threw themselves as far away from the van as they could. Ghoul didn’t know if it was the shockwave or the ground that hit him first. It punched the air from his lungs and knocked his vision into a tailspin of dizziness. He tasted metal behind his teeth and felt a sharp pain in his hip. He covered his face and prayed that his belt of grenades would hold, that they wouldn’t detonate and blow off his legs.

Seventeen heartbeats later he was still alive and possessing all limbs. Someone hoisted him up by the collar of his jacket and he peered at Kobra’s swimming face in front of him. The bandana around his face had fallen, and Ghoul saw his mouth move.

“What?” he said, feeling like he was talking underwater.

Kobra grabbed his face, and his vision swam into focus. He said, “Follow Poison,” and started running. The ground swooped under Ghoul’s feet, but he found Jet, grabbed his hand, and took off. The rocket had blown Dr. Death’s van into little more than a twist of seething metal. That meant they wouldn’t have any cover until they went around the other side of the novac. Ghoul counted on finding cover in the collapsed end of the building, otherwise, he’d either be fucked or have to do something really stupid.

Ghoul could barely think straight, much less shoot straight, but he did his best to cover Jet. Somehow they caught up to Poison, Kobra, and Dr. Death. Jet’s head broke open and started bleeding again. Ghoul looked to his right just in time to see a drac hurdling out a window and lunging for the emaciated and limping Jet Star. He shouted, “Poison!” and threw himself at the drac, hooking an arm around its neck and giving Poison an opening. Poison shot, Ghoul kicked the drac away, then finally, finally, with charges hissing at their heels they rounded a corner and dove behind the crumbling wall of the novac for some cover. There, in a stroke of Destroya-given luck, was a body bag.

Poison unzipped it to reveal the face of a disgruntled Show Pony, squinting in the sunlight. Their mullet was severely askew and they were missing their helmet, but they seemed to be in pretty good spirits, all things considered.

“Wonderful weather we’re having,” they said. A volley of charges and the thunder of drac footsteps came from the other side of the wall. They cursed and backed up against the brick. Somehow, even through being shot at and stuffed in a body bag, their roller skate laces were still tied.

“Hm, quite,” Poison said. “Thanks for getting us into this, by the way, it’s been a treat.”

“Don’t’ look at me,” Pony said, planting a hand on their hip and pointing to Dr. Death. “He’s the one who wanted radio equipment.”

“I’m gonna need it something sore, now,” Dr. Death said. “They blew up the van.”

“Aw, fuck,” Pony said. “My American Pie tape was in there.”

“How many more dracs are there?” Poison asked. Ghoul leaned against the wall and tried to force his brain to solidify and form a coherent thought.

“At least seven inside; they’re protecting the scarecrow,” Pony said. Poison opened his mouth, but Pony continued. “Korse isn’t with them, and I don’t know who it is. They’re in full regulation uniform, all mask-y and shit.”

“Korse wouldn’t be here,” Poison said. “He’s more stylish. He wouldn’t give his dracs a rocket launcher; he’d be the one holding it.”

Ghoul didn’t worship Poison like he used to, now that he knew him and slept in the same room as him and regularly had to deal with his terrible taste in socks. But he still admired him like hell. How he was able to be all "know thy enemy" after being nearly blown into the Phoenix Witch’s cart was beyond Ghoul. He’d never admit it to his face, but Party Poison was fucking hardcore.

Ghoul looked over his shoulder out of habit, even though Jet was watching his back, and caught sight of a cluster of those aluminum drac satellite dishes, pointing at the ground, unused. He had a terrible idea.

“Poison,” he said, flinging out an arm and smacking Poison in the chest.

“What?”

Ghoul pointed, feeling a grin split across his face. “What if we busted in there and used those satellite dishes as shields?”

“That is a terrible idea,” Kobra said.

“That’s a great idea!” Poison said. “Ghoul, you crazy son of a bitch, that would work.”

Kobra scowled.

“Seconded,” Pony said.

That was all Ghoul needed. He ran for it. These were the easy-assemble type of dishes, so if Ghoul twisted the bases just right he could rip the dishes clean off. It took him two trips for four shields. He started to feel a pain in his hip with every step of his right leg but ignored it. This was a Fun Ghoul original plan; no way he was missing out by being injured. Only when each of them had hold of a satellite dish, ready to run, did Ghoul check his ammo. His last clip was in his blaster, and although he couldn’t hear the juice inside slosh, he felt the amount to be dismally low. He’d just have to make his shots count.

“All right,” Poison said. He bounced on his heels. “Don't’ spare the scarecrow.”

They leaped out from behind the wall, Show Pony and Dr. Death moving to cover them as well as they could. The anonymous Scarecrow standing amongst the rubble of the building’s foundation flung out both arms. Each drac that was still vertical moved as if they’d been yanked by their necks to form a barricade in front of the scarecrow. Ghoul could never get over how fucking creepy it was when he saw scarecrows control draculoids up close. Since they had no idea what draculoids actually were beyond the fact that they were vaguely human-shaped, there was no way to explain the scarecrow power. But it was fucking creepy any way you looked at it.

The dracs all started firing at once, and Ghoul crouched, hiding as much of himself as he could manage behind his satellite dish. He heard the fizz and impact of each charge, but the dish held. He crouched, and when a drac holstered its blaster and just jumped at Ghoul, he flung the dish and smacked the drac across the face. It staggered and Jet shot it through the chest. Kobra and Poison brought down the rest of them, fighting their way through the clump. Poison barely hesitated before putting his blaster to the scarecrow’s masked head and pulling the trigger.

All at once, everything was quiet, as if the shockwave of Poison's shot washed away all sound in its wake. Brick dust swirled in the air, and they were surrounded by the stillness of unmoving bodies.

Save for the roar of a single motorcycle engine. Ghoul hoisted himself up on the wall to watch a singular draculoid driving like hell for Route Guano. It was too far to shoot, so he holstered his blaster and watched it go. A tremor ran through his leg, and he slid down the wall to plop down on a cinder block next to Jet.

“Fuck,” Ghoul said.

“Fuck,” Poison agreed. He dropped his satellite dish with a clatter. “Both of you are bleeding.”

Ghoul looked down at himself. Where he’d been clipped on his calf, the fabric of his jeans was blackened and burned, the wound cauterized. It looked like he had a lap full of blood, though, and he probed at his hip, which started to throb something fierce. One spot hurt like hell, and he pressed the flesh, feeling something shift underneath his skin. Probably a piece of the van, if he had to bet on it.

Fascinated, he squeezed, feeling the metal shift again. Tears sprang to his eyes from the pain but he kept going. A slit opened up high on his leg, and breathing through his teeth, he managed to grab hold of a tiny twist of metal and yank. It came out with a spurt of blood. It was about half the size of Ghoul’s pinky finger. He shuddered, suddenly a little sick, and dropped it.

“Damn,” Poison said. Ghoul waved him off. With the shrapnel removed, the pain dropped to a sullen ache. Nothing some alcohol and a big ol’ bandaid couldn’t fix.

Pony picked their way through the rubble and ghosted drac bodies, their gaze fixed on Jet Star. Ghoul looked up at him.

Jet’s face was strained, blood gathered in his hairline. A muscle stood out in his jaw, and Ghoul watched in horror as those purple veins bulged in his neck again, crawling up his face.

Show Pony approached slowly, as Ghoul's heart once again kicked into high gear. “Uh, Jet?” they said. They holstered their blaster and held their hands out palms-up. “You don’t look so good.”

Jet groaned and pitched forward, falling to one knee, clutching his head. Ghoul stood, alarm bells going off in his head. Poison and Kobra were over in a second. Poison reached for Jet but Pony threw up an arm to stop him. Jet swore, and a violent tremor wracked his body. After that, he fell silent except for his ragged breathing. His hair fell in a dark curtain around his face, making his expression unreadable. Kobra, silent as the day was long, knelt in front of Jet, gloved hand spread carefully on a fallen brick.

“I don’t feel so good,” Jet said. Ghoul expected his voice to be weak, but in it, he heard the same coldness, the same Shut the fuck up, Ghoul, and the high twist of fear.

Jet’s hand shot out and grabbed Kobra by the throat.

Kobra’s noise of surprise came out as a gag as Jet crushed pressure into his windpipe. They went down, Kobra pinned under Jet’s weight and struggling, eyes wide and bloodshot, while Jet shouted, “What the fuck- What the fuck did you do to me?”

“Jet!” Ghoul and Poison grabbed at him and Jet, still raving, kicked Ghoul square in the gut and sent him sprawling. His stomach seized and eyes watered, and he doubled over with hacking coughs. Pony jumped into the fray and locked an arm around Jet’s neck. With Poison’s help, they hoisted him to his feet away from the supine Kobra. He thrashed and cursed, reached for his blaster, but Pony twisted it out of his hand and flung it as far away as they could. They caught a fist in the jaw for their trouble and went staggering. All the while Ghoul coughed and crawled and tried to figure out what in the fresh hell was happening.

Jet advanced on Poison. He didn’t even look like Jet Star anymore. He was in the same clothes and skin, but he moved like a cornered animal, breathing hard through his teeth. “What did you do to me?” he demanded Poison.

Poison’s hand fell to his hip, to the butt of his blaster. Ghoul forced himself to kneel and reached for his satellite dish. “Jet Star, we didn’t do anything to you,” Poison said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but what the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Jet said. His eyes locked on Poison’s blaster, he breathed as fast as a bird, trembling like he’d been injected with pure adrenaline. Poison drew; Jet lunged. He got one hand around Poison’s throat and the other around his wrist, pinned him to the wall and twisted. Poison dropped his blaster with a strangled cry, his feet kicking off the ground.

Ghoul didn’t have time to think; he stood up and swung. The edge of the satellite dish hit Jet Star straight on the jaw with a hollow clang. He went down like a sack of rocks.

Chapter Text

“Clear a fuckin’ table, I’m not laying him on the floor,” Pony said.

Ghoul eyed the clutter piled about three feet high on the diner table. It would take too long to pick through it all, so he just swept it off onto the floor with a clatter he felt in his teeth. Kobra and Pony, carrying Jet Star’s barely-conscious form between them, shuffled forward to lay him down. His head lolled, exposing his swelling jaw, and Ghoul felt a hard pang of guilt for what he'd done. He told himself he’d had no choice but to knock Jet out, but that was a lot easier to say when Jet was conscious and had his hand around Poison’s throat. Asleep, he just looked like a badly beat up Jet Star, painfully young without his mask.

“Well, hell,” Pony said, planting their hands on their hips. They always said that before getting down to medical business. They glided to the edge of the table where Jet’s head rested. Kobra stood next to them and stripped off his jacket. He folded it into a neat square and tucked it under Jet’s head. Jet stirred, made a noise of pain, and Kobra rested his hand on his forehead. He fell still again.

Pony got their bag and started cleaning the blood from Jet’s face. “So what the fuck happened?” they asked, threading a needle without even looking at it.

Poison relaid the whole story, giving Pony a play-by-play of the last clap while Pony tended to Jet’s pulled stitches. Kobra reached into his jacket pocket, careful not to disturb Jet’s head, and removed the syringe.

“This is it,” he said. Pony tied off the thread, wiped their hands on their flared jeans, and took it between two fingers.

“And you said there were more? And once Johnny and Babycakes tried to see what was inside these things it evaporated?”

“Pretty much,” Poison said.

Pony hummed, turning the thing over and over in their hand. “Makes sense,” they said. They twisted the cap and it came off with a pop and a hiss. They showed it to them all in turn. “That’s a cooling unit,” they said. “Whatever drug was in there had to have been kept subzero before it was injected.”

Jet stirred again, and this time he seemed to be fighting his way back to consciousness. His eyelids fluttered and he made a pained noise in the back of his throat.

“Jet, is that you?” Kobra asked, keeping his voice low.

“Mm,” Jet said. “Why would it… not be me?”

“No reason,” Kobra said. “Ghoul, Party, and Pony are here, too.”

“Oh,” Jet said. “That’s good.” Then he stiffened. Ghoul’s fingers flexed at his sides. Jet’s head tossed from side to side, starting to panic. “Oh, fuck, the dracs, they-”

Kobra reached out and grabbed Jet, one hand on his head, the other walking up the vertebrae in his neck. Jet sucked in a panicked breath, then Kobra pressed two fingers into his temple and a thumb into his neck, and Jet’s eyes rolled back in his head. He let out a sigh and fell unconscious again.

“Damn,” Show Pony said.

Kobra didn’t comment. “He’ll be out for about another minute,” he said. "Reckon we gotta keep him calm."

“Right,” Pony said. “Well, babes, the only thing I can tell now is that I don’t know what it is, so I can’t whip up an antidote.”

“So there’s no cure,” Poison said.

“Babe, don’t be a pessimist, I didn’t say that,” said Pony. “BL/ind wouldn’t send dracs out with a drug that makes you turn on your crew without an antidote. Accidents happen, you know. Imagine some dracs with a rogue Scarecrow, you know, in their midst. They’d have to have a way to subdue them.”

“That’s smart, Pony,” Ghoul said, impressed.

Pony grinned. “You’re a doll, Ghoulie,” they said.

Jet stirred for the third time, and Ghoul knelt by the table so he was just about eye level with him. He figured it would be less intimidating. Poison knelt next to him, pressed his calf against Ghoul’s in silent solidarity. Ghoul pressed back.

“Jet,” Kobra said. He set a hand on Jet’s temple again, and this time Jet leaned into the touch. But his brow wrinkled and Ghoul saw his pulse kick underneath his jaw. His brown eyes flew open and his pupils dilated into anxious pools of inky black. Pony watched him closely. Kobra took his hand.

“Hi, Jet,” he said.

“Hi, Kobes.” The hand that wasn’t in Kobra’s flexed into a fist at his side, and the rest of him tensed up like an amateur trigger finger.

“What’s going on in your head?” Kobra asked.

Jet swallowed. "Don't know," he said. "I can't remember a lot, and I'm… uh…” He closed his eyes like he did when he was embarrassed. “I'm scared."

He looked at Ghoul, and Ghoul tried his damn best to look as not-scary as possible. Pony said, “Interesting.”

“I’m fine,” Jet added. “Just give me a second.” He held two fingers to his pulse and breathed through his nose. Kobra reached out to stroke his hair, seemingly without a second thought.

“What are you scared of?” Pony asked.

“Not sure,” Jet said. “I feel… like someone’s out to get me.”

Kobra made a sympathetic noise, using Jet’s hand in his grip to help him sit up. He kept an arm draped over his back. Then Pony went “Oh!” and smacked their hand down on the table. Jet started and so did Ghoul, even though he’d never admit it.

“What?” Poison said. “Why ‘oh?’”

“It’s fear,” Pony said, adjusting their mullet, which had flown askew. They hissed, “That’s so fucking smart.”

“What’s fear?” Jet said, voice high.

“The uh, the fuckin’. . .” Pony snapped their fingers, starting to glide away from the table in their excitement. “The drug. It’s using fear to pit Jet against his friends.”

Jet let his hands rest, palms-up, in his lap. He peered at Pony. “That makes a lot of sense,” he said.

“It does?” Ghoul said.

“Well, yeah,” Jet said. “Y’know. I don’t remember much. But I do remember thinking you were out to get me.”

“Do you still feel like that?” Pony said. They rested their chin in their hands, propping their elbows on the table next to Jet’s shoulder. Pony’s gaze was so intense it would have made a lesser man tremble. It made Jet smile.

“I mean, yeah,” Jet said. Ghoul felt his stomach drop. “But, y’know, I know better. If that makes sense. I feel it, but I know you’d never hurt me. So I'm okay.”

For whatever reason, Ghoul felt all mushy and touched. Here was his Jet Star, not the scary Jet, and his Jet Star was beat to hell and having the worst few days he’d had in a while, and that included the shoelace incident of last month. Ghoul ducked his head and smushed his face into Jet’s chest in a mute request for affection. Jet hugged him, tangling a hand in his hair.

“Don’t die, Jet,” Ghoul whispered. “You’re not allowed to.”

Jet rested his chin on Ghoul’s head. “Don’t say ‘die,’” he said. “I won’t.” This time Ghoul could hear the smile in his voice. “I promise,” and Ghoul pulled away—feeling better—because Pony probably still needed to do their thing. Sure enough, they leaned on the table again, getting all up in Jet’s space. That was just how they did things, though, and it was so reassuring it put some of Ghoul’s nerves at ease.

“Now, Jet Star,” Pony said. They had on their best devious look, and the sentimentality drained out of Ghoul as curiosity replaced it.

“Yes, Show Pony,” Jet said, with his heaviest mocking serious face. Poison snorted.

Pony put his hands on both sides of Jet’s face, squishing his cheeks. “This is gonna be weird for both of us,” they said. “But it’s a super special medical examination. It’ll have to be like Zone 5 where we never talk about it again.”

Kobra raised his eyebrows.

“Didn’t you just talk about it?” Jet asked, smirking. He hooked his finger through Pony’s belt loop. Ghoul didn’t like where this was going, no siree. From the looks of Kobra, he didn’t either.

“No,” Pony said. They kissed Jet on the mouth.

Ghoul had no idea what went on in Zone 5, but he was pretty sure he could go the rest of his life without knowing, given the way Pony was trying to stick his tongue down Jet’s throat. He honestly didn’t know how to react. Not like this was out of character for Pony—they’d kissed Ghoul on the mouth many a time. Ghoul just kind of forgot how graphic Pony could manage to be. Not that Jet seemed to mind. Yeah, he definitely didn’t want to know what happened in Zone 5.

Pony broke away with a nasty sound and hummed in contentment, eyes still closed. “Yeah, just how I imagined it,” they said, and pushed Jet’s face away with a dopey grin. Jet flushed prettily and scratched the back of his neck, flustered.

“Pony,” Kobra said, faintly. “What was that?”

Show Pony turned to Jet again. “Jet, baby, you taste like pills,” they said.

Jet looked at his hands, sober again. “Fuck,” he said.

“Fuck,” Poison and Kobra said, at the same time.

“Fuck,” Ghoul said, because he didn’t want to be left out. But then he realized.

“Fuck,” he said, this time with feeling. Despite every remedy and concoction Show Pony had managed to come up with, the one thing they hadn’t managed an antidote for was BL/ind pills. Pills, at least, for new zone runners fresh from Battery City, wore off. After a week or two in the desert, the runners started to feel again, started to see color. Ghoul suspected there was no wearing off of whatever they’d injected Jet with, and the only antidotes there were for things that tasted like pills were in the medical labs in Battery City.

“So you’re saying if we want to cure Jet,” Ghoul said, holding up a hand. “We have to break into a Battery City medical lab.”

Pony bared all their teeth in a grin. “Yes,” they said. “Isn’t that exciting?”

Chapter Text

“I know you have it here somewhere,” Poison said. He was so buried in the bottom level of a shelf that Ghoul couldn’t see much of him besides his legs and ass, which Ghoul would very much like to kick because he was going through his fucking workshop without asking. Yeah, Ghoul kept his workshop in chaos, but it was Ghoul chaos. He knew where to find shit in Ghoul chaos. Party chaos was a whole different deal that took weeks to revert to sustainable levels of Ghoul chaos.

“What’s ‘it?’” Ghoul asked. He kicked the sole of Poison’s boot.

“You’ll see it when I fuckin’ find it,” Poison said. Ghoul sighed, sat down on his stool, and waited. He looked out the window to watch Show Pony, Dr. Death, Kobra, and Cherri Cola tearing apart the drac van and making it suitable for Dr. Death-Defying’s noble purposes. Ghoul could just sense all the wires he’d have to splice, all the dishes he’d have to connect, and the radio antennas he’d have to coax into working, the fucking graphing calculator he’d have to program if Dr. D wanted to make them headsets like they had before. He watched Kobra hoist a robust satellite dish out of the trunk of the Trans Am and stagger under its weight like a newborn deer. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t. And it definitely wasn't funny that Kobra would be no help out there whatsoever.

Poison cursed and threw something heavy that sounded like a rubber mallet. Ghoul sighed. He peered out the window again, looking in the shade of the diner’s roof for Jet Star, where he should’ve been sitting, recovering from his concussion if he knew what was good for him. Dr. Death and Cherri were all caught up on what was going on with him. Ghoul saw Cherri shoot Jet looks on occasion just to keep him where Pony put him. Ghoul couldn’t see him very well but he was pretty sure he was stationed in Pony’s lawn chair.

He thought about Jet Star, about Battery City, and how the hell they were going to pull this off. It wasn’t like they were busting straight into BL/ind headquarters, but it was still big. They were entering the city, something Ghoul hadn’t done in years. A mission of this caliber required a plan, and backup, and walkie-talkies, and contact with guys in the van. A plan. They weren’t moving today, though. Jet was concussed, Dr. Death and Pony still needed to load up the van with new equipment and whatever they managed to salvage from the old one. Ghoul spared a moment of thought for that van. He’d put a lot of work into that thing: repairs, radios, that nifty headset system. They’d all done the paintwork, but mainly Poison, armed with spray paint from Tommy Chow Mein’s shop. She had been a thing of beauty. Maybe they could have a funeral for her when everything was over with and Jet Star was in good health.

“Here’s the bitch!” Poison said, emerging victorious from a pile of Ghoul’s stuff. He slammed down a roll of blue paper on Ghoul’s table in front of him. Ghoul didn’t recognize it, which was odd, because he thought he knew everything in his shop.

“What’s that?” Ghoul asked.

Poison propped his hip against Ghoul’s side, reaching around him to unroll the paper. Ghoul leaned against him and let himself be small for a minute, enjoying the smell of Poison's freshly washed hair, his sun-dried shirt. “You smell good,” he told him.

“You don’t,” Poison said, smiling. Ghoul looked down at the paper. He had to laugh.

“Is this drawn in crayon?” he snickered.

Poison flicked him on the nose. “Don’t poke,” he said. “This is the best map you’re gonna see of the Bat City maintenance tunnels. Tommy’d blow me for this kind of info.”

Ghoul scoffed. He looked at the map again instead of Poison’s pretty fuckin’ eyes. He really looked this time, and the more he did the more genius he saw, even though it was drawn in green fucking crayon. He flattened his hands over it, over this absolute gold mine of information, and felt lightheaded.

“How the hell do we have this?” he asked, devouring the details, trying to commit them to memory. Poison shifted, and Ghoul realized he was leaning so much weight against him he’d go tumbling off his seat if Poison let him go. The tiniest of trust exercises.

“Cherri Cola,” Poison said, smiling.

“Cherri fuckin’ Cola?”

“Yeah, I’ve never told you this?” Poison said.

Ghoul propped his chin on Poison’s shoulder. “No,” he said.

“Well,” Poison started, in his storytelling voice. “Way in the bygones, before you came around from Bat City, Cherri used to have a… a fuckin’... oh, what is it? When you have a good memory. Idol… Endo…”

“Eidetic?” Ghoul said.

“Yeah, eidetic,” Poison said. “He had an eidetic memory. And he used to run that underground radio channel in the city. They’d operate in the tunnels and shit, so he just memorized ‘em. Once he got out into the desert he drew them and a whole bunch of plans of buildings he knew of, all that. Next fuckin’ day after he made the blueprint, guess what?”

“Hm?”

Poison snickered as he remembered. “Pony was fuckin’ line dancing, as they do. Skate flew off and popped Cherri right on the jaw. And, you know, it was his jaw, it knocked him out cold for maybe a minute and when he woke up he’d lost his elephant memory.”

“Eidetic,” Ghoul corrected, but he was laughing so hard he could barely breathe, imagining Show Pony doing high kicks to rival the gods, the graceful and deadly flight of their rollerskate. “Destroya,” he said. “I bet Cherri was so pissed.”

“He set Pony’s first American Pie tape on fire,” Poison said. “His memory’s still scary good, just not elephant.”

Ghoul knew he was saying it wrong on purpose, so he didn’t correct him. “Ah, man,” he said, once the laugh attack was over. “It’s gonna be weird going back into the city.”

“Yeah,” Poison said. “Not impossible, though, there are plenty of crash queens who come in and out for food and stuff. Parts.”

“We’re the Fab Four, though, and the rebels think you’re desert Jesus,” Ghoul said. “It’s gonna be different for us since Korse wants to personally take a bite out of your ass.”

Poison shivered. He was dodging the serious path the conversation could go down, and Ghoul was thankful.

“His teeth shall go nowhere near my ass,” Poison said, then his grin turned sly. “That pleasure is reserved for you.”

Ghoul gagged and shoved Poison and his ass away. “Fucking Pony is rubbing off on you,” he accused.

Poison’s grin got even eviler, if that was possible. “Bet you’d love to see that–” he said, then went, “Ack, no, I’m sorry!” when Ghoul started pelting him with half-inch bolts. He ran from the workshop laughing, shielding his face, and saying something about his very important and urgent van duties.

Ten minutes later the door creaked open and the cans Ghoul had hung around it clanked. He scooped up another handful of screws, ready to fire if it was Poison back for round two, but it was only Jet Star, carrying a crate. The box was chock full of what looked like walkie talkies and a heap of other radio equipment. Ghoul clapped his hands. “For me?” he said.

“Yep,” Jet said. Ghoul made grabby hands and Jet deposited the crate on his table with a thump. He leaned over Ghoul’s shoulder like a little ghost to look at the paper spread across the table's surface. “Cherri’s map,” he said. “Did he really fucking do it in crayon?”

Ghoul laughed, but then he remembered that this was Jet Star—a concussed Jet Star who needed to be fucking resting—hanging over his shoulder. He whirled. “Why aren’t you sitting down?” he demanded.

Jet flinched like he’d been slapped, and Ghoul’s insides rotted and dropped to the floor. “Aw, fuck, Jet, I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like an absolute asshole. “Destroya, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Jet shook his head, already trying to play it off with a nervous laugh. “It’s okay,” he said. “Y’know, I’m gonna be jumpy until we get the antidote for this drug and everything–”

“That’s not an excuse,” Ghoul said. He looked in Jet’s eyes and saw his dilated pupils, saw the cut running from the corner of his eyebrow to his ear, the ugly bruises on his jaw and neck, and felt so sorry for him he wanted to jump out a window or something. “Man, I beat you to hell and now I’m scaring you, fuck, I’m so sorry.”

Jet looked confused. “Beat me to hell?” he said. “You didn’t do this.” He pointed at his neck. “Or this.” He pointed at his ankle, which Pony had wrapped up.

“I knocked you out,” Ghoul said. “Fuckin’ concussed you.” The more he looked at that bruise and Jet’s headache-wrinkled brow the more he felt like a terrible friend.

Jet touched the bruise at his swollen jaw. Ghoul hadn’t broken it, at the very least. The thought didn’t make him feel better. But Jet smiled, something genuine that made the corners of Ghoul’s mouth lift without him telling them to. “Good hit,” he said. He took Ghoul’s elbow and gave him one of those trademarked irresistible Jet Star looks. “I’m not mad,” he said. “I’m serious. You made a good call, and I don’t blame you for scaring me, either. I’m gonna have to deal with a lot more than that when we break into the city. You stopped me from fuckin’ killing Kobra…”

Jet’s face crumpled into a look of self-loathing, and Ghoul was not having that, no sir. “If I’m not allowed to blame myself for knocking you out, you’re not allowed to blame yourself for anything you did at the haunt.”

“But I–” Jet said.

“Nope,” Ghoul said.

“It’s different, you–”

“Jet Star,” Ghoul said. Jet snapped his mouth shut. “Shut up and help me with this fuckin’ crate.”

Jet sat on the edge of Ghoul’s table. In his usual spot for when he came to visit the workshop. “This isn’t over,” he said, but he was smiling.

Ghoul spent the rest of the day going through the crate of equipment and fending off Jet’s attempts at helping. He wasn’t successful on that front. Jet whined until Ghoul started asking him to hand over tools and parts. He had him strip wire and do menial tasks that, to Ghoul’s knowledge, wouldn’t aggravate his bruised brain. He liked Jet’s brain and would prefer it to be in good shape for when they broke into Battery City.

With Jet helping he got everything done faster, although it wasn’t like he was doing rocket surgery. He was putting together the fundamentals of a Dr. Death-Defying van, so the number one priority was a good functioning radio. Ghoul could build a radio in his sleep. But hell, they already had one. Pony had ripped it out of the dashboard and dumped it in the crate. All Ghoul had to do was tell Jet not to touch the two wires at the same time and do a few modifications.

Kobra came in to periodically pick up Ghoul’s finished parts and take them out to the van. He took the radio out the door before Ghoul had a chance to stop him. He turned to Jet, who was setting the pliers where they belonged, trying his best to emulate Ghoul chaos.

“They have no idea how to install that radio,” Jet guessed.

Instead of answering, Ghoul started counting down from ten. “Nine… eight… seven…”

Right when he hit one Poison came bursting through the door, shrieking, “Ghoul! Help!”

Jet looked like he had a coronary right there on the spot, and Poison stayed to blubber an apology while Ghoul went and installed the damn radio. Most of all he just felt sorry for Jet. Normally he was the stoic, capable badass of the bunch. Well, not a stoic as Kobra, but who could be? Ghoul knew he hated jumping at shadows and feeling responsible for hurting his friends. That was all the more reason he was itching to get into the city. And, hell, he was excited. The fight would inevitably dissolve into draculoid-colored chaos, and Ghoul fucking lived for chaos. Not so much the aftermath, but he tried not to think about that too much.

Back in his workshop, he cracked open the set of walkie-talkies. Poison stayed and hung around with Jet Star, so Ghoul now had two minions to fetch him tools on a whim. It proved to be menial busywork of repairing five faulty transmitters, and Ghoul got tired of sitting while working. He climbed his car parts shelf and slung his legs over a rafter, suspending himself upside down about a foot above his workbench. It made his hip that had taken the shrapnel twinge, but he didn’t care.

“What’cha doing?” Poison asked, trying to turn himself upside down, too, as if to see the world from Ghoul’s perspective.

“Turnin’ into a bat,” Ghoul said. He popped open the fourth walkie talkie and the casing went flying. “Fuck,” he said. “Poison, can you get that?”

Kobra came in a minute later, sweaty from the heat of the day and working in the van. He’d tossed off his jacket and was walking around in just his tank top. That and his greased up hands from replacing tires and a wheel on the new van made him look tuff as all hell.

“Hi, Ghoul,” he said, reaching up a freakishly long arm to slap Ghoul on the leg. It left a perfect black handprint on his jeans. He then deposited himself in Poison’s lap and said, “Hold me, brother. I am weary.”

“I hate you,” Poison said. Kobra smeared grease on his face.

By the time Ghoul had finished fucking with the walkie talkies, everyone had gathered in his workshop. He didn’t have time to do anything fancy with the channels or anything, just named one device “Van Dude” and the other four “KJ Dudes” and made then a closed channel Van Dude to all KJ Dudes, all KJ Dudes to Van Dude. It wasn't headsets, but it would do.

Ghoul could barely feel his legs, so he flattened his hands on his table. "Gird your loins," he said as a warning, and let his feet go, flinging himself into a handstand and then off the table to his feet. To him, it felt damn impressive, and Jet Star awarded him with a golf clap for his troubles. Only the best for Jet.

"Okay," Poison said, once everyone was upright and gathered around Cherri Cola's old map. "Here's the plan."

Chapter Text

Ghoul barely slept that night. He supposed it was too much to hope for a good night's rest when tomorrow was a day for invading Battery City. He peered at Jet Star, who was barely a shapeless lump in the dark. Jet turned around and looked at him. "Hi," he said.

"Hi," Ghoul whispered.

"I got the shakes, look," Jet said. He held out a hand in the space between their cots. His flat hand trembled like a radio antenna in a windstorm. "Ain't that a bitch." He tried to laugh, but Ghoul saw the stress cracks in his eyes. He was doubting himself something fierce. Ghoul recognized the look because he felt it himself, in the secret places of his mind he never let anyone see. Sometimes, even after all these years he felt like the new guy, and doubted he could roll with these rebels who’d escaped the city before they were ten years old.

He reached out and took Jet’s hand, flattening it between both of his. He said, “Sandwich,” and Jet laughed.

“We’ll be fine,” Ghoul said. “You’ll be fine. I know you, and I know you wouldn’t turn on us again.”

“I came close today,” Jet said, taking his hand back. “When Poison came into the shop. I really thought he was after me, it was almost like I didn’t recognize him. I, like, forgot myself.”

“Yeah,” Ghoul said, “But you didn’t.”

“But I almost did.”

“We’re not playing horseshoes,” Ghoul said. “You fought it. You did it. And you’re strong enough to do it again.” And he meant it. Jet was still the capable badass, and Ghoul trusted him with his life, drugged or not.

Jet fell silent for a moment. “You’re really good at this,” he said, not bothering to hide his small smile.

“Anything for the love of my life, Jet baby,” Ghoul deadpanned.

“Oh, fuck you,” Jet said.

Ghoul heard Kobra shuffle and mumble in his sleep, and realized he’d probably been too loud. He didn’t sleep through the rest of the night well, but even a little something was better than running on fumes. Kobra, Jet, and Poison were up similarly early.

Breakfast was as much Power Pup as they could stuff in their faces, with Poison waving a fork around as they went over the plan and every contingency that involved Ghoul and high explosives. He wasn’t exactly hoping for those situations, but if one arose he wouldn’t be too bummed about it. He never got to blow stuff up as big as a security gate. Although if their plan worked as well as Poison hoped, he wouldn’t have to. Still, when breakfast was over and it was time to move before the heat of the day, he packed his kit he dubbed “heavy shit.” The one with the hacky-sack-sized clump of Composition 4 in double casing at his belt. Ghoul didn’t risk carrying more; he was crazy enough to be a walking artillery trunk, but not suicidal.

They all dressed to the nines. Kobra wore his cool fucking belt with the thigh holsters, Poison donned his tightest, most BL/ind-fightingest of jeans, Jet Star threw on his good, shiny boots, and just for the hell of it belted one of Cherri Cola’s swords to his leg. They made a shiny as hell picture, standing there against the rising sun. So much so that Ghoul had a moment where he looked at them and really fucking loved his friends. He could be dead in less than three hours, but he wouldn't trade this life for anything.

They had to leave the Trans-Am behind. Poison would rather have left his own foot. But their plan required stealth, and a car with a spider painted on the hood didn’t exactly scream “low profile.” They, along with Dr. Death-Defying and Show Pony, piled into the yet unpainted BL/ind van. Cherri Cola stayed behind to man the radio, and played the best Mad Gear and Cold Dead Hands tracks he could think of. Show Pony drove, and Ghoul felt the music in his blood, let it set his heart racing and his foot tapping. They hurtled down Route Guano to Zone 2.

Chapter Text

Back at the novac, Poison’s plan counted on nobody having looted it yet. Cherri Cola had purposefully kept the haunt under the radar, and it had paid off. From what Ghoul could see it was untouched save for the stuff they’d already looted. Five motorbikes were still parked out in the sun, helmets hung over the handlebars. Hell yes.

“Alright, Pony,” Poison said when Pony parked the van. “You know what to do.”

Pony knocked a salute off their helmet. “Follow,” they said.

“Right,” Poison said. He flipped up their visor, looked into their eyes, and with all the intensity he could muster, said, “Stay gold, Ponyboy.”

Ghoul laughed. Kobra opened the van door and they went tumbling out through the pile of novac rubble. A night had passed, so the ghosted dracs were nowhere to be found. All bodies disappeared during the night in the desert. If they were going to impersonate dracs like Poison planned by wearing masks, they were out of luck. The motorcycle helmets would have to do to hide their faces. What wouldn't do, though, was their clothes. They picked through the vacant rooms of the novac, hoping to find a stash of drac uniforms. Kobra emerged victorious, a heap of white fabric clutched in his fist.

“Aces!” Poison said. Getting the outfits on over their regular clothes, however, was not so aces. Dracs had a standard size about them (which fueled Ghoul’s suspicion of them being robots), and so where they fit Jet Star and Poison fine, Ghoul was swimming in his and Kobra was exposing a good couple inches of wrist and ankle.

“I feel like a fucking garbage bag,” Ghoul said, trying to roll up his sleeves. His pant legs flapped around his boots and would be living hell if he tried to ride a motorbike.

“It’s just for a little while,” Poison said.

“Tuck ‘em under,” Jet said. “Here–” He flipped Ghoul’s sleeves underneath so they didn’t drag over his hands. Ghoul noticed his hands shaking as he did and caught his eye.

“I’m all right,” Jet said. “I can do it.”

Ghoul smiled. “That’s my boy.”

“Giddy up,” Poison said, and they followed him back out into the sun. Ghoul picked the bike on the left of the lineup and dropped the helmet on over his head. Kobra did the same next to him, swinging a leg over his bike and making it look easy.

Poison was the one who stalled. “I’ve never actually ridden a motorbike before,” he said, as if it was a recent realization, as if their whole plan didn’t hinge on these bikes.

“You’ve ridden a regular bike,” Ghoul reasoned. At least, that was how he reasoned it to himself the first time he got on a motorcycle. “This one’s just faster.”

“Don’t think about it,” Kobra advised. “If a drac can do it, so can you.”

“Yeah…” Poison said. He flattened his hair into his helmet and Jet did the same. He had to loop his into a knot and tuck it up under the helmet so he wouldn’t look suspicious.

“I’ll lead,” Kobra said. “If they suspect it's us they’ll think Poison’s in front.”

“Why’s that important?” Ghoul asked.

Kobra shrugged. “Throw ‘em off their rhythm or something, I don’t know.”

Ghoul’s walkie talkie beeped to life at his belt, and so did Jet, Poison, and Kobra’s. It was Pony, peering through the windshield of the van. “Hello? Is this thing on? Over,” sounded from all of them simultaneously.

Ghoul adjusted his volume. “Yeah, we hear you. Over.”

“Then get a fucking move on,” Pony said.

“You forgot to say over,” Ghoul said. Pony honked the horn at them.

Ghoul fired up his motorbike engine and damn near started salivating. He couldn’t help it, he knew horsepower when he felt it, purring like a mountain cat underneath him. “Oh, baby,” he said, not caring that he sounded like a complete idiot. “I’m keepin’ you.”

“Gross,” Kobra said. He winked at Ghoul through his helmet and took off, and Ghoul followed close behind. It took some fiddling with the controls but he got the hang of everything quick. It was intuitive. He looked in his mirrors to see Jet and Poison following. They had no trouble with the bikes, either. From the shape of him, it looked like Jet was tailing Ghoul, with Poison bringing up the rear.

Ghoul couldn’t resist flipping up his visor and gunning it, feeling the whipping, dry wind rip tears from his eyes. His whoop of delight was lost in the wind, but he didn’t care. He was absolutely in love with this bike. Once they got back to the diner he’d hit up Tommy Chow Mein and paint her a true Fun Ghoul green so bright it gave you a headache from space. He sidled up next to Kobra and pumped his fist in the air, trying to let him know just how fucking excited he was. Kobra saluted him, and even though Ghoul couldn’t see his face he was pretty sure he was laughing. He felt fucking unstoppable.

It took them no time at all to cross Zone 2, not when they were hurtling at ninety miles per hour. No landmarks marked the beginning of Zone 1, but Ghoul felt the change like stepping through a curtain. The massive silhouette of Battery City appeared out of the dust, and the heat hit him like a wall. He had to flip his visor down to avoid getting sandblasted.

Ghoul had only been in Zone 1 a handful of times, and there was a reason he and Poison called it Mars roving when they ventured within sight of Battery City. Heat rolled in waves from the titanic climate control units, so strong as to buffet Ghoul’s bike and make him feel like he was driving at a dust devil. It was a dry heat that skimmed the sweat right off his neck. If he stayed in one place for too long he would probably crisp like a strip of sweet potato skin.

He could imagine—remember—being a kid in Battery city. From the top floors of apartments and office buildings, he could see over the walls, see the searing desert that looked like the surface of an alien planet. Try as the Director might, she couldn’t create a machine efficient enough to wipe out all zone runner propaganda. Back when he had a different name he knew about rebels before he knew his times tables. When Ghoul used to stand on his tiptoes to look out the window, he couldn’t believe there were people who could stand living out in what looked like the dusty, burning hell of Zone 1.

His walkie talkie crackled to life at his hip, and since he was the one most likely to live through taking one hand off his handlebars, he listened to Pony ask how they were. They said something about how the van couldn’t catch up, Ghoul wasn't sure.

“We’re Mars roving,” Ghoul said. “ETA seven minutes at Battery City. Over.”

They made it in five. Ghoul and Kobra took the lead and they took the exit that would lead them to a drac deployment gate. Apparently, draculoids and Scarecrow units somehow fit into the “maintenance” category. Maintenance of the peace or whatever.

Ghoul signaled for Kobra to slow down, and they fell back in line with Jet and Poison. Poison would be the one talking when they encountered the gate guard, so they let him pull ahead as the nearing walls loomed taller.

“Go time,” Ghoul said, just to make himself feel better. He watched Poison talk to Pony up ahead, telling them to go radio silent until they were clear through the tunnels.

Ghoul slowed with Poison down to a not-suspicious speed. He straightened his spine, fixed his neck, and tried to look as much like a draculoid as he could. And prayed Poison wouldn’t get it in his head to say something weird. He still had nightmares about the “updog” incident.

Poison braked and Ghoul slowed down behind him at a calculated distance. He faced forward. He barely breathed. Ahead of him yawned the opening of the tunnel—sturdy white concrete and corrugated metal lit with searing fluorescent lamps. Smooth, maintained asphalt curved into and underneath the city walls.

A masked BL/ind employee stepped in front of their convoy with even strides. They clasped their hands behind them in parade rest, expecting.

Poison waited a breath before speaking over the hum of his engine. “Scarecrow unit R-19 draculoids,” he said.

“Identification,” the employee said. Ghoul’s heart kicked into high gear. He didn’t know anything about identification. But the guy hadn’t asked for it, more stated it, as if he was going to fingerprint them or something. Ghoul watched Poison, and when Poison didn’t move, he stayed still, too, heart hammering.

The BL/ind employee produced what looked vaguely like Tommy Chow Mein’s barcode scanner. As if this was just routine, he scanned the sides of each of their helmets, waiting for a dull tone to move on to the next draculoid impersonator. Ghoul could only imagine how Jet was feeling. His heart rate was probably chugging at a comfortable 200 BPM.

“R-19 scarecrow unit?” the employee asked.

“Scarecrow unit R-19 draculoids,” Poison repeated. “Our ha- outpost was compromised by rebels. Insubordinate Party Poison killed Scarecrow R-19. Reporting back to S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W division.”

The employee made a note on a flatscreen tablet that would have cost more than Ghoul’s C-4 out in the Zones. “Proceed to the following gate.”

Ghoul’s impulse was to grin, but he pressed his lips tight together and stared straight ahead. If he could telepathically communicate a “Holy hell, good job,” to Poison, he would have done it.

The gate blocking the tunnel parted to let them through. Victory soared inside Ghoul but he tamped it down. Not the time. He followed Poison into the maw of the beast, his motorcycle purring in low gear underneath him as they advanced at a crawl.

The sudden absence of color and heat almost made Ghoul dizzy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been somewhere as cool and humid as this. The tunnel curved a right turn and began a steep decline. Going down with his foot on the brake, Ghoul felt like he was descending into the guts of the city, even though he’d barely scratched the surface of the vast, twisting infrastructure that lay underneath. They followed the gradual curve of the tunnel, too wired to look anywhere but straight ahead. Ghoul kept his eyes trained on the next curve of the tunnel until the second gate appeared, just as Cherri Cola had drawn. The following gate was heavier, with more security. Ghoul did the mental calculations of weak points, how he could mold his C-4 to blow the gate. He wasn’t sure he had enough, even if he got creative. From the looks of it, though, he wouldn’t have to. The guards gave no indications of suspicion.

This time the faceless employee was backed by an exterminator with a hand on each of her blasters, one at each hip. Poison’s hands tightened almost imperceptibly around his handlebars. “Scarecrow unit R-19 draculoids,” he said again.

“R-19…” said the employee, thinking.

“We are fleeing the outpost raid in Zone 2,” Poison said. Maybe it was because Ghoul knew him so well, but he could sense the tension rolling off him, the overwhelming pressure to not fuck up his lines. “Our Scarecrow was killed by the rebel Party Poison.”

The exterminator’s hands tightened around the grips of her blasters, and Ghoul knew that Poison had made a mistake. He mouthed, fuck, under his helmet, but didn’t reach for his blaster yet, still concealed underneath his uniform. He didn’t want a firefight this early. The earlier the shooting started the more likely Jet was to turn on them, hell, the bigger chance there was for any of them to get ghosted.

“Full sentences without request,” the employee said. “Very well. Stand down, Richter.”

The exterminator released her grip on her blasters, clasping her hands behind her back. “Sir,” she acknowledged. For a moment Ghoul was taken aback by her obedience. The only other exterminator he knew—Korse—seemed like the kind of person who would rather shoot himself in the foot than take orders. Odd for someone so high up in the BL/ind command structure.

“Awaiting orders,” Poison said. Ghoul could just hear the litany of curses running through his head.

“Orders for Scarecrow unit R-19,” the employee said. Ghoul stiffened on instinct, pretending he was a footsoldier eagerly awaiting orders. “Return registered vehicles to R Unit garage and report for re-education. That is all.”

The gates parted and Ghoul let out the heavy kind of breath that only came after a close call. He glanced at Jet Star in his mirror and found him trying his best to hide the tremors running through his hands. Poison advanced. As Ghoul passed the exterminator, he kept his eyes trained on her. Her black eyes locked on Ghoul’s, gaze boring through his tinted helmet.

Horror sank through him like a stone through molasses. She knew. He wasn't wearing a draculoid mask under his helmet and she knew. They were impersonators. She reached for the communicator in her ear.

Ghoul cursed and gunned it. Up next to Poison he tore his helmet off and Poison did a double-take, ripping his off too.

"What?" he said. His face dropped. "She saw through your helmet."

Ghoul nodded.

"Fuck!" Poison said. Jet and Kobra pulled up beside them.

Kobra took his helmet off too, bracing it between his chest and bike handlebars. "What gives?" he said.

"Exterminator fucking saw my eyes," Ghoul said. Poison hit the brakes, and with a squeal of tires came to a stop in the middle of the road. Jet stopped right behind Ghoul. He kicked his foot down and took off his helmet, sending his hair cascading over his shoulders. That, at least, was right with the world.

"You okay?" Ghoul asked him.

"Not a priority," Jet said. His hands were shaking.

Ghoul heard an echo from far down the tunnel, something that sounded like the roar of an engine growing nearer. They knew. He swore and looked to Poison, his hair standing out like a flare in the fluorescents.

"What do we do?" Ghoul asked.

Poison's eyes narrowed. "Stay on the bikes, I'll take the lead and we'll go up the tunnel for the research division."

"On bikes?" Jet said.

"They're on our boots now, so yeah, we'll need to outrun them," Poison said. "Ghoul, if there's a gate you need to be ready to blow it up."

"Born ready," Ghoul said. They’d blown their cover, so he figured he wouldn’t need to wear the nightmare of a drac uniform anymore. He shifted his bike into gear and took off after Poison just as the roar of a siren started to echo seemingly from all directions. He kept one hand on his handlebars, bent low over top of them, and stripped off the starchy BL/ind-white uniform shirt. He radioed Pony, something like glee and a little bit of fear and a little bit of vomit bubbling up in his chest.

“Pony,” he said. “Come in, Show Pony.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re sunspots,” Ghoul said. He looked to Poison, who did a little gesture with his hand that Ghoul somehow understood. They spent too much fucking time together. “Poison says to proceed with the plan.”

“Roger that, cowboy,” Pony said, and dropped off the line.

As they advanced, other tunnel entrances started opening on either side of them, their gates anchored shut. A small stream of hovering, box-shaped drones drifted between the bars from a few tunnels, following the road lines at an even clip. Ghoul would kill to get his hands on whatever maglev system made them hover like that, but he had no time. The sirens and heavy engine roar drew closer, although the wavy acoustics of the tunnel made it impossible to tell which direction the noise came from.

“Ninth tunnel on the left,” Ghoul said to himself, drawing up a mental image of Cherri Cola’s map. “Ninth tunnel on the left.” He counted as he pushed his bike faster, ran smack into a drone that went careening off to parts unknown.

When Ghoul counted the ninth tunnel, Poison banked left and slammed on the brakes. Ghoul’s heart lodged in his throat. He’s gonna skid, he thought, screwing up his eyes, but Poison managed to right himself and stop his bike. Ghoul, Kobra, and Jet all managed to grease it in and dismount their bikes at the gate.

“You got maybe forty seconds, Ghoul,” Poison said. He shed his drac disguise and seemed to explode into color like a firework shell. He dropped to a kneel and loaded his blaster with a fresh charge from his bandolier, pulled his mask up over the bridge of his nose.

“Cover me,” Ghoul said. Jet, Kobra, and Poison set up a three-man barrier between him and the rest of the tunnel. Ghoul took the Comp 4 from his belt and broke it in two, molding it, dough-like, in his hands as he thought. He could blow either the hinges or the seam, not both, not more. He could only use two of the three detonators he’d brought.

Hinges, he decided, and got to work. He tuned out the sirens, back to his friends, and molded the C4 with a steady hand. Plastic explosives and black powder could smell fear, so he needed to be confident and he needed to be right. The first zing of a white BL/ind blaster charge flew inches past his ear. He didn’t flinch.

“Showtime, Ghoul,” Poison shouted, over the sizzle and scream of charges.

“Hold your horses,” Ghoul said. He held his first detonator wire so carefully in the palm of his hand. If he pulled it, the little charge buried inside the lump of C4 would blow, and then it would be bye-bye, Killjoys. He pressed the other detonator into the other clump of Comp 4, and that was all there was to it.

“She’s live,” he said. He turned to see Kobra pull off a crack fucking shot and shoot out the tires of an oncoming Scarecrow’s motorcycle, sending them skidding to the asphalt. Whatever thing that had the hulking engine hadn’t arrived yet, and Ghoul didn’t want to stick around long enough to find out what exactly it was.

“Blow it up already!” Poison said. He dropped to his knee again, reloading.

“It’s fucking C4; move your asses if you want to keep them,” Ghoul said. One hand on his blaster, he joined the shootout between the Killjoys and a shrinking group of draculoids. The other hand let wire slip so carefully through his fingers, unraveling as he forced Poison, Jet, and Kobra out into the cover of the main tunnel. They hit the asphalt with Poison still shooting, and Ghoul covered his ears, and yanked the wire.

The initial bang and shockwave rattled Ghoul’s bones and sent two draculoids flying backward in a tangle of limbs. Next came the screech of tearing metal as the gate’s decimated hinges gave way, sending the steel crashing to the pavement.

“Go, go, go!” Poison was saying, but Ghoul was already moving. He flung a leg over his bike and gunned it, standing up on the guards as it bounced under him driving over the fallen gate. His mirrors were full of Jet Star, the Kobra Kid, and a horde of dracs in hot pursuit, all aiming their blasters for Ghoul’s ass. The tunnel bottlenecked in a severe funnel, and Poison shot in front of Ghoul to take the lead going eighty into a tunnel barely meant for foot traffic. Ghoul turned to his left to look behind him, and dazzling light and pain went searing across the corner of his mouth. Blinded by white spots and involuntary tears, he drove on instinct, leaning his bike into a swaying zigzag, trying to make himself harder to hit.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, feeling the barely-cauterized blaster wound on his cheek crack open and spill blood into his mouth. Not much longer. This was a short supply tunnel to the biochemical weapons lab disguised as a medical research center. They’d make it; they’d have to make it just about now.

Poison held up a fist in warning the second before he braked. He tried to lean it like he would when stopping the Trans Am, but it sent him into a tailspin and he managed to throw himself off the bike before it crashed into a concrete wall. Ghoul braked and prayed to Destroya. He wasn’t sure if it was faith or a good grip that saved him from careening into that wall. Kobra stopped with a hair to spare but Jet had to jettison like Poison. Kobra and Ghoul were there to catch him, though, and hoist Poison off the ground by his collar and take cover behind a robust wall of white shipping crates.

Jet shook like he’d just grabbed a power line. Ghoul could see his pulse hammering at an insane speed in his neck, his veins standing out from sky-high blood pressure. He heaved in fast, shallow breaths through his teeth. Ghoul recognized that look, the one that meant he was about to break. He’d seen it back at the novac right before he’d grabbed Kobra by the neck.

“Jet Star,” Ghoul said.

“You’re friends,” Jet said. “You’re friends; you won’t hurt me.”

“That’s right,” Ghoul said, attempting to sound calm, even though he felt like he could have a coronary himself. “Me, Poison, and Kobra are here. The dracs are the ones you need to be scared of.”

Jet nodded, a short jerky movement that worked wonders for Ghoul’s nerves. “I got it,” he said. Poison stood up, aimed, and fired over the edge of the crate. Ghoul heard two dracs hit the floor. Party Poison didn’t miss.

“Stairs,” Poison said, pointing. It was maybe a twenty-yard dash from where they were to the corrugated metal stairs leading to a door with a crash bar. No other security. “We’ll run and cover just like at the novac.”

Ghoul and Kobra didn’t count it down or anything. They just took off, charges clipping at their heels and clanging off of corrugated metal. Ghoul dropped to a knee at the top of the stairs and shot out at the slow trickle of dracs coming through the tunnel. Fish in a goddamn barrel. He and Kobra had the advantage of high ground. They kept Poison and Jet well covered as they came up the stairs and crashed through the door, slamming it shut behind them. It was thick steel and sealed well, so it blocked out almost all sound coming from the tunnel. For the first time in hours, Ghoul could hear his breath.

He also heard the clatter of something metal falling to the floor.

He looked into the room they’d just sealed themselves in. It stretched on for an indeterminable length, piled high with white crates and cabinets all stamped and labeled with the BL/ind logo. It seemed to be some kind of storage facility underneath the lab. And they’d just barged in on some poor pharmacist-looking wisp of a guy, guns in their hands and draculoids on their asses. He’d dropped a tray of what looked like very important chemicals, a bottle of which had shattered and was seeping into a reddish puddle on the cement floor.

“Killjoys…” he said, eyes wide. Like he was witnessing a solar eclipse rather than four bleeding guys in absurdly tight jeans. He began taking slow steps backward. Ghoul saw him eyeing up the fire alarm and advanced. With a discreet flick of his thumb, he switched his blaster’s safety on. He jabbed the business end under the pharmacist guy’s chin. He squeaked and tried to back up, but Ghoul had him backed against a table. Ghoul wasn’t very tall, but he knew how to loom, and he could look pretty fucking scary if he wanted to.

“I wouldn’t go for that fire alarm if I were you,” he said. Poison shot Ghoul a warning look, but Ghoul flicked his wrist to show Poison he’d made his gun safe. He wouldn’t shoot a civilian, not in a million. He would shake him up, though. “What’s your name?”

The pharmacist guy whimpered. “Dantzig,” he said. “Doctor Emmett Dantzig. Oh, don’t, don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me please. I’m not…”

Aw, fuck. He looked so scared that Ghoul almost caved. But he held it together. “What kinda job do you have here? You a high-up?”

“I’m– yeah, I’m a developer. An organic chemist.” His eyes went crossed trying to look at the gun Ghoul had jabbed into the soft flesh underneath his jaw. Something, probably a draculoid, hit the closed door with a bang. Dantzig flinched and Poison, Jet, and Kobra braced their backs against the door, holding it closed.

“You develop the drug they just deployed dracs with into the desert? The one that has to be kept subzero and makes people turn on their crew?”

Dantzig shook his head, fast and birdlike. “That’s classified. It doesn’t have a name yet; records say it’s still in the human trial stage–”

“Where’s the lab?” Ghoul said.

Dantzig made a pained noise and glanced towards the fire alarm again. Ghoul grabbed him by the white collar, jerked his gun, and he cried out, “Okay! Ninth floor, in the Beta lab. Just don’t tell them I told you, please, please, they’ll re-educate me, please.”

The dracs hit the door harder, and Ghoul heard Poison cursing, boot soles squeaking on the floor as he, Kobra, and Jet tried to hold back the horde. “What about security?”

“You need an authorized badge.”

“Are you authorized?”

“I’m–I mean, I think so, I’m head chemist of my department so–”

Ghoul would have to take the chance. He snatched the badge off the front of Dantzig’s lab coat and stowed it in his pocket.

“Ghoul,” Poison grunted. “You fuckin’ done?”

“Fuckin’ done,” Ghoul said. He took his blaster from Dantzig’s head and he sagged with relief. “I wasn't actually going to shoot you.” Ghoul showed him the safety of his blaster. “We don’t ghost civilians. Thanks, though. The desert’s alive if you ever want to run for it.”

“Not the time!” Kobra said. As he ran by he neatly snatched Ghoul up into stride beside him. The dracs pounded at the door, and Ghoul looked back to see that somehow Poison had wedged spent blaster magazines into the cracks and jammed it from opening. Across the storage facility there stood another door that had to be a stairwell. Ghoul lingered in the doorway just long enough to watch poor Doctor Emmett Dantzig crumple in a faint. Then he was running again, taking the stairs three at a time.

“How’s the doc?” Poison asked.

“My charms brought him down in a faint, but he’ll live,” Ghoul said. The stairs were murder, stealing all the breath from him until they couldn’t go any higher and were spit out into some kind of service hallway. With maybe six people all turning to look at them in varying expressions of horror.

“Shit,” Poison said, scanning the hall. “Why don’t the fucking stairs go all the way up?” There was no time to complain about the architecture, though. He and Ghoul spotted an elevator at the same time and dashed for it, just as the whining bell of an alarm started ringing from all corners of the building. Draculoids crashed through the door behind them and Ghoul could just feel them on his heels, even though he didn’t look back. Never looked back. He flung himself between the closing elevator doors just ahead of Jet and Kobra. The dracs opened fire from across the hall but the charges fizzled against the steel doors as the gap closed and sealed.

Everything went quiet. The elevator started climbing up towards the ninth floor. Ghoul sagged against the wall next to Poison, Jet, and Kobra, breathing hard. Only then did he notice, backed into the corner in fear, were standing three people in lab coats identical to Dr. Dantzig’s.

“Sup,” Ghoul said, attempting to look friendly. Then he remembered he was laden with at least fifteen pounds of explosives slung over his shoulders and braced to his belt. He was also still bleeding from the mouth. He probably didn’t make a very friendly picture. “I’m Fun Ghoul,” he said anyway.

“We know,” the braver of the bunch—a black-haired, older woman—said. “You’re rebels. The Fabulous Killjoys. The deviants from the desert.”

Poison, despite his red face and sweaty hair, preened. “Charmed,” he said, with a toothy grin. Kobra dropped his face into his palm.

“I could call law enforcement,” the woman said.

“Oh, those pigs know we’re here, don’t worry,” Poison said. “You guys’ll probably have to tumble, though. You know dracs. They couldn’t hit a hotcake from a bootstrap.”

Ghoul had to fight hard to keep a straight face, mostly because laughing would hurt, but also because he’d never heard anyone say that in his life, and he was pretty sure Poison was just making shit up. His limbs were still jittery and it made him want to vibrate so hard he started sending off radio waves. Adrenaline made him sharp-tongued and giggly. He needed to run.

The digital display over the elevator doors read 9. “This is our stop,” said Poison.

“Duck,” Jet Star advised the three civilians. The veins in his neck stood out in purple relief, but he was in control. Although for how much longer Ghoul wasn’t sure. They needed that damn antidote and fast. Ghoul was sure that just looking at someone and being able to tell their blood pressure was very bad.

The doors parted and the elevator was instantly filled with zinging light and the shouts of the civilians hitting the floor and protecting their heads. Ghoul took what cover he could inside the elevator and fired until his magazine was empty. He reloaded. They dropped dracs like soda cans, but it was only that easy because there was no Scarecrow yet to organize them, to do a bunch of creepy hand-waving and bring order to the forces. They had a golden window Ghoul knew Poison didn’t intend to waste.

“Beta lab,” Ghoul reminded him. Poison nodded, pushed his mask further up his nose. Ghoul threw him Dantzig’s badge and they rushed out into the hallway. They stood back-to-back like a four-pointed star, firing in a deadly ring. Ghoul felt untouchable. But none of them were. Kobra stumbled next to him as a charge grazed his leg. Kobra swore and Jet Star scooped an arm around him to hold him up.

Ghoul, facing backward, had no idea where they were going, so when Poison said, “Found it,” he had to trust him. And when Kobra yanked him through a doorway by his collar he went willingly, trying to kick the door shut in his wake. It barely budged. The only thing that kept Ghoul from breaking a toe was his steel-toed boot. He shoved with his shoulder to get the heavy, drac-stopping thing closed. He grabbed for a nearby table but found it bolted to the floor, so with Kobra’s help, he heaved a shelving unit in front of the door. It wouldn’t hold forever, but hopefully it could buy them enough time to find the antidote and pray to the Phoenix Witch to keep Jet’s soul on earth.

“Aw, hell, I feel like a scientist,” Poison said. Ghoul finally turned and got a good look at the room. At Poison flinging cabinets open and putting on a pair of heavy-duty safety goggles, the glass magnifying his excited bug eyes. The room was a lab, all right. Ghoul could count the names of the equipment he knew on one hand, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to get his hands on all of it. Tear it apart, figure out how it worked. Somehow use it in the Trans Am to communicate with aliens.

“You look like a bug,” Kobra told Poison. He approached a shining, white-topped lab table stacked so high with paperwork it was taller than him. He put his hands on his hips and stared it down. If he wasn’t wearing sunglasses his Kobra Kid gaze could have probably lit the stack on fire. “Right,” he said.

Ghoul eyed the lab that went on and on, empty—against all odds—except for the work of the absent researchers. He couldn’t believe their luck and had no fucking idea what to do with it. Neither did Poison or Kobra, it looked like. Kobra’s leg was still smoking near the knee. He put all his weight on his uninjured leg, and almost daintily rested the toe of his other foot on the floor. Tremors ran up his leg, but he gave no sign he cared. Ghoul, on the other hand, had to try hard to stop tears from springing to his eyes as he grimaced and only made the pain in his face worse. He probably looked like he’d been the one to take a bite out of Kobra’s leg.

“You reckon we need to get into a computer?” Poison said. “That’s where they’d keep the information on an antidote.” He looked to Ghoul. Ghoul stopped himself from smacking a hand to his face just in time. Of course. Of fucking course he would bring a whole arsenal of explosives, and then forget to bring anything that could help him hack into a database.

“You forgot your thingy, didn’t you?” Poison said.

Ghoul said, “That’s very likely.” Poison called him a dumbass, but in the way that meant he wasn’t really mad. Then a huge thud, like a hit from a battering ram, slammed into the door, jarring it open for a moment. Ghoul got a flash of a drac talking on a radio, confirming that a Scarecrow was on the way. Ghoul slammed his shoulder into the shelf and backed it up against the door again.

“Okay,” he said. “Uh, Kobra, anything good in those papers?”

“They’re calling this the Brutus Project,” he said, setting a stack aside. “I doubt they’ll put it in their notes where they keep the stuff.”

Poison did something weird with his arms and went, “‘Et tu, brute?’” making fun of the name.

“Fuck off,” Kobra said mildly.

The dracs hit the door again. Jet flinched.

“What if…” he said. His eyes were stuck on the door, and those purple veins were just beginning to crawl up the side of his face. Ghoul wanted to reach up and scrub them away like an oil stain. “The drug and antidote will probably be stored together. Is there a–”

“A big ass freezer!” Poison said.

Jet huffed out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, we should try that first.”

Poison put his hands on Jet’s cheeks. “You’re a genius,” he said. Jet blushed.

Ghoul jumped up on a table and surveyed the land. The tables were set up so they had these partitions between them that fooled him into thinking the lab was smaller than it actually was. When he spotted something that looked very much like a walk-in freezer, he pointed and said, “There!” He desperately wanted to add a “she blows” on to the end, but he figured now wasn’t a good time for being a pirate.

He draped Kobra’s arm over his shoulders and helped him walk as they set for the other end of the lab. They’d have to be fast because they’d be cornered in that thing if the dracs broke in. Ghoul tried his best not to think about that, cause himself undue stress and all.

The heavy door to the freezer came open with a hiss and a wash of dim blue light. Kobra said, “Freaky,” and Ghoul thought it described the place pretty well. Cramped, dim, and so cold it made Ghoul’s teeth chatter, it was stacked full of sinister-looking vials, little flat dishes spotted with bacterial growth, a ten-gallon bucket of something whose name was so long the label looped around the whole tanker. There wasn’t much room, but Ghoul, Poison, Jet, and Kobra could fit.

“Fuckin’ freezing,” Poison said, zipping his jacket and doing a whole-body shiver. He let out a breath and it fogged in front of his nose. His eyes went wide and he crossed them, blowing out another puff of chilled air. Then he laughed. “Ghoul!” he said. “Look!”

Poison breathed out again, and so did Kobra, pulling down the bandana over his mouth. He exhaled a little cloud, and a small, sweet smile came to his face that just made Ghoul want to hug him. Of course, they’d lived in the desert since forever; they didn’t know your breath fogged when it got cold, or that you lost feeling in your toes, or that sometimes when BL/ind messed with the temperature too much you might be lucky to catch a snowflake before they regulated the climate again. All they knew was sun and heat.

But there wasn’t time to dwell. Ghoul started picking through shelves, careful to stay away from the little dishes full of green and pinkish fuzzy bacterial things he could go his whole life without ever seeing again. He looked for anything that wasn’t labeled, and Jet reached up to look at the shelf above. Kobra limped out of the freezer before anyone could stop him and came back, inexplicably, with a sterile, sealed bag of sharps. His sunglasses were fogged from the temperature change.

Poison reached behind him and closed the door with a whooshing sound. Ghoul felt as though he’d been dropped in a glass of ice water.

“What did you do that for?” he asked Poison, picking up a heavy-ish jar without looking at it. Sometimes desert heat got unbearable, and on those days ghoul fantasized about what it might be like to buy some ice, have a tall drink of water, or just step into a refrigerator and camp out for a few hours. Now that he was in one he preferred the desert heat. The desert didn’t make his fingers feel like they were about to fall off.

“Defense,” Poison said. “I rate this door a solid four on the drac-keeper-outer scale.”

Made sense. Still didn’t change the fact that Ghoul couldn’t feel his toes.

“Ghoul,” Kobra said. “You want to keep that dead frog or should we keep looking?”

Ghoul looked down at the jar in his hand, and almost dropped it when he saw two beady, dead eyes looking back at him through a hazy yellow juice. The frog seemed to have at least three tentacles that should not have been there, and Ghoul did not fuck with that at all. He went, “Eugh!” and shoved it back on the shelf, far out of reach. Poison laughed at him.

Ghoul picked up a box in his numb fingers and gave it a little shake. Something clattered inside like a bunch of little rocks. He pried open the lid to see with dismay that he’d just shaken up a box of tiny computer chips and shattered at least a third of them. He ached to know what they were used for. They were barely the size of his thumbnail and yet he had the suspicion that each one had enough computation power to melt his brain.

As the Phoenix Witch would have it, the next box he picked up was unlabeled, packed with vials. “Jet, look,” he said. Jet leaned over and read the circular stickers on top of each little glass vessel.

“‘B-x Anti 17,’” he said. “Confirmed for deployment.”

Ghoul flashed him a grin. “What do you wanna bet?”

“I’ll bet you a crispy grilled cheese,” Jet said. He smiled. “Poison, look.” He thrust the box at Poison, who took out a vial and held it up to the light. He read the label.

“Well, shit,” Poison said, bearing his toothy grin. “I think this is it.”

Kobra leaned over to read the vial, leaning on Poison’s shoulder. “I don’t see what else it could be.”

“Great,” Jet said. He reached for the sharps and tore the plastic off one, popped the top off the little glass jar. He tried to stick the sharp into the jar to load it, but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t upend the vial, much less get the needle in.

“Here,” Kobra said. He took both from Jet’s hands. He loaded the syringe like he’d been doing it all his life, pulling clear liquid free of bubbles into the tube. Kobra had these steady hands, almost medic hands, save for the way they shook around blood. “I’ll do it for you.”

A muted but definite crash came from the other side of the lab, and after that, the pounding of many footsteps. “Fuck,” Ghoul said. Fuck, thirty seconds and they would be cornered.

Jet’s eyes widened. His pupils dilated and grotesque purple veins climbed up the side of his face like spider legs. Ghoul’s stomach dropped. Kobra stepped back as Jet cried out and clutched at his head. The squad of dracs hit the door hard, and the sharp voice of a Scarecrow came shouting through the door, saying something like “Killjoys,” something like “Surrender.”

Jet peeled his hands away from his face, eyes wide and teeth bared, chest heaving. His head swung from the door to Poison, Kobra, and Ghoul. Not now, Ghoul thought. Not fucking now. But Jet was clenching his fists and breathing through his teeth as fear seized him by the throat.

“I…“ he said. He shook his head as if trying to drive the fear away. “I… fuck…”

Ghoul had no idea what to do. Which was ridiculous, he almost always knew what to do. But he couldn’t knock Jet out again, but he had no idea how to talk him down, either. If Jet tipped over into madness like he did back at the novac, trapped in this coffin-sized space with him, they’d be ghosted before the dracs could get through the door.

Kobra held out a hand and took a step forward.

“Kobra, no,” Poison hissed. Kobra ignored his brother, holding up a hand to shut him up. He lowered his shoulders, making himself smaller, shorter than Jet Star, pulling off his bandana so Jet could see him speak. “Jet Star,” he said, softly. He took another step forward. Jet fixed his wild gaze on Kobra, shaking all over.

“Jet Star,” Kobra said again. The sound of the dracs pounding on the door outside seemed to fall away as the air thickened with tension. “Do you remember me?”

“I… I don’t…”

Kobra stepped forward again so he was almost toe-to-toe with Jet. “Jet Star,” he said.

“I can’t…”

Kobra’s gaze held him pinned. Jet barely moved except to shake as adrenaline demanded him to move, to pounce on Kobra with all his misplaced survival instincts. Kobra reached up and cupped Jet’s face in his hand, thin fingers curled softly into his hair. Ghoul felt himself suck in a panicked breath and thought, This is it; this is where he breaks.

Kobra took off his sunglasses, face unthinkably, suicidally, uncovered in Battery City. His eyes gleamed in the cold gaze of BL/ind lights, and he said, “Ray.”

Jet Star went still. Ghoul barely breathed. Jet’s pupils contracted to pinpoints, blew wide, and settled back to normal. He grabbed onto Kobra’s hand and held for dear life. “It’s me,” he said.

Ghoul gaped. A real name, an exposed face, in the fucking middle of Battery City. It was official, Kobra was fried. Or maybe a genius. Or maybe both. He watched Jet Star sag, clinging to Kobra like sanity. He dropped his head to Kobra’s shoulder and Kobra stuck the needle in his neck without ceremony, depressing the plunger. Jet barely flinched. Even though he knew the antidote wouldn’t take effect instantly, Ghoul felt relief coarse through him. Ridiculous, because there was a swarm of dracs outside. But if they survived Jet would be better.

Jet went weak in the knees, and Kobra couldn’t hold him up and walk with only one functional leg, so Ghoul acted as his crutch. He turned to look at Poison and watched him kick the far wall. For some reason.

“Holy fuck,” Poison said. Ghoul maneuvered Jet so both of them could turn around and watch Poison flatten his hands against the wall.

“What are you doing?” Kobra said. Poison didn’t answer. He kicked the wall again, and Ghoul heard a deep thud as if there was a hollow space behind it. “Poison,” Kobra said. “Dracs.”

“Give me a second. Ghoul, toss me that badge.”

Ghoul dug Dr. Dantzig’s badge out of his vest pocket and tossed it at Poison, wondering what the hell he was on now. He had his mad genius look about him, though, so Ghoul let him be and reloaded his blaster. Jet managed to stand up on his own, looking pale and haggard, but still able to thumb the safety off his gun and aim for the door, covering Poison. Ghoul told himself to wait. Hold his ground.

A second later Poison shouted with glee. Ghoul felt his hand grab him by the jacket, whirling him around to look at a door that had definitely not been there before. It led to an ominous dark space. Which was wavy. Poison had gone and found a secret room.

“The hell?” Jet said. “Should we go?”

Ghoul looked at the door, then back at the secret room. He heard the Scarecrow outside bark an order to stand back, and knew the door was about at the end of its reign. “I say creepy room,” he said and herded Jet and Kobra through the opening. Poison found a handle and yanked the secret door shut behind him, shutting them with an unassuming shushing sound in total darkness. But only for a moment.

Lights flickered to life overhead, the same cold blue that cast sickly shadows over Jet’s face and sinister ones over Poison’s. This room was bigger than the freezer, no less cold, and looked like a dust devil had run through it. That wasn’t quite right, though. Ghoul looked harder and recognized the chaos of someone in the middle of a project, understandable to no one but themselves. It was how his workshop looked. What didn’t look like his workshop, however, was the tube running floor to ceiling on the other side of the room. In the syrupy blue substance it was filled with, Ghoul saw something floating that he didn’t like the shape of one bit. A chill that had nothing to do with the air dropped through him. Cold like he was in a place he should never have found, cold like there was no way out.

Poison took him by the arm and gathered Jet and Kobra into a little huddle. Kobra spoke first, whispered, “What the hell is this place?”

“Dunno,” Poison said. “But if we’re lucky, that scarecrow doesn’t know about it.”

“How’d you even find it?” Ghoul asked. “It feels…” He couldn’t find a word, so he just settled on, “. . . bad.”

“Yeah, I don’t like that tank thing,” Jet said, throwing a glance over to the corner of the room, as if the sickeningly human-sized tube had crept forward while they were looking the other way. It hit Ghoul then that they’d gotten what they came for. Jet was injected with the antidote and would recover. If everything went to plan they should be running for Show Pony and Dr. Death right about now. But this break-in was far from over.

“I just found it. Sounded hollow, so I scanned that guy’s badge to open it,” Poison murmured. “It gives me the jeebies, too, but I’d rather be here than out there with the dracs.”

A crash sounded faintly from the other side of the secret door, and all their hands went to their blasters. Ghoul backed up for the wall, pressing himself against it at the side of the door. Kobra limped over to join him, and Poison and Jet took the other flank. Ghoul wasn’t the praying type, so he didn’t ask for the Phoenix Witch to help them. Just waited and felt his bones vibrate in anticipation. Eyed that tank in the corner. A small part of him wanted the dracs to find the door, just so they would blast it open and at least give them an opportunity to fight their way out. Ghoul couldn’t shake the feeling of being removed from time and space, of standing in a coffin. Of knowing in detached horror what was in that tank.

Time passed in tense silence. Ghoul risked it to edge closer to the secret door and press his ear up against it. He could barely make out voices, much less words, but he could hear the big shifting movements of a cluster of draculoids. Poison shot him a questioning look. Ghoul responded with one that he hoped meant, Results inconclusive.

Next Ghoul heard a stillness. Then the Scarecrow shouted so loudly Ghoul could hear, “I don’t care; tell her to deploy Korse!”

Ghoul didn’t know what his face looked like, but it seemed to unsettle Poison. He mouthed, “What?”

Ghoul beckoned him with a crooked finger and spoke in his ear. “Scarecrow gave an order to deploy Korse.” He heard Poison gnash his teeth, and curse under his breath.

“What’s our move?” Ghoul asked. Even through his thrill of fear he felt his eyes drawn to the tank in the corner.

“Gonna keep us here,” Poison said. Kobra and Jet leaned in to listen. Kobra braced himself against Poison’s shoulders. “Give it three minutes.”

“Are you hoping they’ll move?” Jet asked. Maybe it was placebo or something, but Ghoul thought he looked better already. That, at least, put some of his nerves at ease.

“Maybe,” Poison said. “Korse’ll be here in five. We’ll fight our way through whichever dracs stay and then find Pony.”

As Poison’s plans went, it wasn’t spectacular. But nobody had any better ideas. Ghoul stepped away from the door, counting the minutes in his head. He trusted Kobra to keep time more than himself, but it couldn’t hurt if he counted, too. The lull spread over the four of them like night, all afraid to break the silence and give away their hideout.

“Kobra,” Ghoul whispered, trying to think of a way to be tactful. Tact had never been something he was good at. Kobra looked up at him from reloading his blaster. “Do you think they heard you say Jet’s other name?”

Kobra shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. He glanced at Jet with a look for only him. What that look communicated Ghoul could never tell. “I made a decision. I think it was worth it.”

Ghoul couldn’t fault him for it. Kobra had acted; Ghoul had stood there and contemplated concussing his friend again. If BL/ind somehow got anything out of Jet Star based on his first name, it was worth it to have him up, moving, and cured.

As he thought, Ghoul found his eyes wandering again. To that blue tank, to the floating shape. He looked away, and Jet met his eyes. Ghoul could tell he’d seen it too. “Should we look?” he said.

“Feel like I have to,” Ghoul said. This time all of them looked over. Ghoul knew they were feeling the same compulsion to go. He was the one who moved first, though. He dodged a desk piled high with papers and a setup of three dark computer monitors as he went.

Close up, the tank was taller. Ghoul didn’t want to get closer, but he couldn’t back away, either. He reached out, placed his bloody fingertips lightly on the glass. A slow stream of bubbles floated up from the base of the tank, and forward through the viscous blue liquid floated the face of a young girl.

Ghoul knew—he had known the shape was human as soon as he’d seen it—he just didn’t want to believe someone so young could be here, could be tubed up and floating in a cold plexiglass womb. To be poked and observed and taken notes on. Her face was sweet and young, probably no older than eight. She bore a small resemblance to Jet Star, with her strong nose, warm brown skin, and halo of dark, curly hair. Her eyes were closed, and it made Ghoul so deeply sad that he flattened both hands against the glass as if he could reach through and touch her, take the tubes from her arms and see her eyes. It was ridiculous, he’d never seen this girl before, but Ghoul could feel it like a mark under his skin that she was important, that she was worth protecting.

“Suspended animation,” Poison said. His voice sounded strained, and Ghoul glanced over to see him swipe roughly at his eyes.

“Yeah,” Ghoul said. He reached up as if to brush the hair away from the girl’s forehead, but his knuckles hit the glass. He felt his face crumple. A bead of blood ran down his cheek like a tear.

“It’s been three minutes,” Kobra murmured.

“We should… go,” Poison said. He didn’t move.

“We can’t leave her,” Jet said. “Who knows what that doctor’s doing to her?”

“I know,” Poison said. “Fuck, Ghoul, could you figure out how to work this thing?”

“Not before Korse gets here,” Ghoul said. Even if he was safe and had days on his hands he wasn’t sure he could navigate something this complex. He built radios and bombs out of tin cans; he didn’t raise little girls from half-life.

“Then we have to leave her,” Poison said. He was trying to inject bravado into his voice, but Ghoul knew he was shaken in a way he couldn’t quite push past. “I’d rather we leave her than ghost her trying to get her out of that thing.”

Ghoul nodded and peeled his hand away from the glass. The girl, the girl, the special girl, floated, unaware. He forced himself to turn and leave, taking Poison’s elbow, and walk away. But he wasn’t, really. Some strong, inexplicable feeling of duty caught in his gut like a fish hook. They weren’t leaving this special girl, not for good, not for long.

As they passed the desk again, Kobra knelt with his one good leg, dug through a drawer, and came out with something square, about the size of their walkie-talkies, but thinner. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.

Ghoul listened through the secret door again, but couldn’t discern much. He tightened his grip on his blaster and readied himself for a clap. He filed the girl away in his mind, because if he was thinking about her, he wouldn’t live long enough to come back and save her.

Poison mouthed, “On three.”

Ghoul said, “Wait.”

Poison looked at him. “Listen,” Ghoul said. They fell quiet, Ghoul heard a buzzing like something charging up. Then a screaming alarm blared through the room. Different from the fire alarm, it was less a bell and more a piercing tone. Ghoul felt like his skull was vibrating, and knew it was time to go.

Poison shouted, “Go!” and threw his shoulder against the door. Ghoul fired first and thought later. He hit two dracs before the Scarecrow moved, waving their arms to build a wall of drac bodies to defend them. Poison shot them down with four clean charges. Kobra lunged, ignoring his bad leg to fling a spectacular kick to the Scarecrow’s head. It connected with a crunch and the Scarecrow crumpled. Jet made quick work of the two remaining dracs and then they were off running.

Out through the lab and into the hallway, Poison led them in a dead sprint. Dracs on the other end of the hallway started firing, and Ghoul felt charges sizzling at his heels as he followed Poison. He shot blind over his shoulder. He felt like Korse would hop out from around a corner like a boogeyman.

Poison beelined for the elevator they’d come out of. He stopped in front, waiting for the automatic doors to part, but they stayed still. He dug his fingernails in the gap between the doors but couldn’t get them to budge.

“They shut down the elevators,” Ghoul said, grabbing Poison by the elbow. “We gotta find the stairs.”

Poison turned on his heel and ran. “Of fucking course, fucking stairs,” he panted. At the next corner, it wasn’t Korse, but three draculoids that jumped out and opened fire. Ghoul hit the floor and shot up at them. He brought one down, Jet got another, and Poison dropped the final one.

At the end of the hall was a door with a crash bar that Poison hit hard. Ghoul tripped out onto a concrete landing and was almost blinded by the sunlight shining through huge windows. They’d found the stairwell, contained within a square tower of thick glass.

“Pony!” Poison barked into his walkie talkie. They started down the stairs, and next to Ghoul, Kobra tripped. Jet had to catch him by the back of his jacket and enlisted Ghoul to help carry him between them.

“I’m fine,” Kobra said. He looked greenish. “Let me walk.”

“Hell no,” Ghoul said.

Pony came over the walkie talkie, and the crash and thunder of footsteps, along with Ghoul’s cursing, muffled their words. Ghoul made out, “. . . rendezvous? Over.”

Poison replied, “At the big fuckin’ glass tower. You’ll see us. Over.”

Ghoul went as fast as he could go while taking Kobra’s weight. He left his right hand free to shoot and debated throwing a grenade. Too much damage, though. He didn’t want to bring down the staircase. So he shot and tried to make himself and Kobra as un-hittable as he could. Even though they were on the low ground, whatever he was doing worked. Kobra didn’t get hit again and they had a clear shot down to the building’s first level.

At least until he heard Poison curse and looked down over the railing, down through the vertiginous spiral staircase. Dracs were swarming the first floor and starting up the steps. Ghoul peered for an unmasked head, for Korse’s fucking gigantic height, but could only make out drac masks. He said, “No fuckin’ boogieman,” and Kobra looked at him funny.

“Poison!” Ghoul said. “Can we get through all those dracs?”

Poison skidded on the landing and did his best to cover Ghoul, Jet, and Kobra. His clip snapped hotly away from his blaster and he reloaded in the time it took Ghoul to take one step. He was running low. He always ran low; Ghoul had to be the ammo mom and bring him extra because he was the only one who owned a bandolier.

In the back of his mind, Ghoul knew they weren’t getting out through the first floor. He knew Poison had something in mind, though; he had that look. Ghoul just hoped they weren’t jumping out a fucking window. He wasn’t sure Kobra would be able to stand up afterward. Hell, he wasn’t sure he’d have knees afterward.

Still, they couldn’t make it down the stairs unless four guys could suddenly outmatch seventy dracs and the looming threat of Korse. They would meet on the second landing. Ghoul had an idea.

“Jet, take Kobra for a second,” Ghoul said. “Cover me, Kobes.” Ghoul handed over his blaster and Kobra took it in his other hand. He took his arm off Jet’s shoulders, forcing Jet to hold him by the waist as he twisted to shoot double-handed behind his back.

Ghoul dug into his pack, slouching underneath Kobra and Poison’s covering fire. He unspooled the wire from his last detonator and reached for the remaining Comp 4 at his belt. It wasn’t quite the size of an egg, but it would be more than enough.

“Ghoul… “ Jet said.

“I got a plan,” Ghoul said.

Jet fired and dropped a drac with steady hands. “A headset plan or a ‘rollerskate on the roof of the diner’ plan?”

“A headset plan, fuckhead,” Ghoul said, and folded the wire in two. He wound it between his two middle fingers and tied a knot, leaving about six inches of slack. Then he pressed the Comp 4 into his palm and closed it in his fist. He felt the wire squish into the plastic explosive. Don’t drop it, he told himself.

“Don’t drop it, Ghoul,” Jet said. He was smart, ol’ Jet Star. He knew what Ghoul was doing.

Ghoul came down on the landing to the second floor and ran smack into Poison’s back. Poison must have been expecting it, because he barely moved. Or it could have been because he was staring a Scarecrow in the masked face, and a stumble forward would mean him getting shot.

Ghoul caught Jet and Kobra before they could run into him. Jet ducked before looking up to realize that the dracs above them had stopped firing. The Scarecrow, holding up two of their left fingers, had stopped them. They stood with their blasters at their sides, all facing the Scarecrow and awaiting orders. In the absence of the zing and fizzle of flying charges, Ghoul’s ears rang. Electric silence fell.

Then the Scarecrow stepped aside. A ripple went through the crowd of dracs as they followed suit, and Poison found himself face to face with Korse as he stepped up onto the landing with a dramatic flourish of his coat.

He held his blaster almost casually at his hip. His white coat hung to the heels of his severe pointed boots. And he was gloved, cold, dangerous. Six and a half foot of bald-headed Exterminator. Ghoul felt himself freeze. He watched a nasty little smile come to Poison’s face. That crazy motherfucker.

“Party Poison,” Korse said. Even though he had almost a foot on Poison, Poison was doing that thing where he drew himself up as if he was at the head of an army, giving himself the impression of being about eleven feet tall. That was the face that made him the infamous Party Poison, the face that put a five hundred thousand carbon bounty on his head for any Exterminator who could nab him.

So far Korse had been the closest. Because Korse was the best. Poison never talked about it—at least not to Ghoul—but Ghoul had his suspicions that neither Poison nor Korse truly wanted to succeed in their missions. Korse’s being to bring BL/ind Poison’s red head on a stick, Poison’s being to bring the rebels Korse’s head on a stick. Ghoul had known it from the first time he’d seen them grin at each other over smoking ray guns in some nameless part of the desert. They lived for hunting one another.

But they didn’t love it enough to not shoot when the time came.

Korse raised his blaster, and that was what Ghoul needed to break him from his stillness. “Wait!” he said.

Korse cut his eyes down at him. He regarded him almost politely as, “Fun Ghoul.”

Ghoul held up his fist at shoulder height, and Poison’s eyes bugged once he saw what Ghoul was holding. He shot him a look like, What the fuck? This wasn’t part of the plan.

Ghoul said back, There is no plan. Just trust me.

“Do you know what this is?” Ghoul said, raising his voice so the dracs and Scarecrow could hear. His heart thrilled in his chest at the thought of more than seventy… well, things listening only to him.

“It’s Composition 4,” he said. He didn’t take his eyes off Korse, but saw the Scarecrow stir. They recognized it. “It’s a plastic explosive. It’s real safe; you can’t set it off with fire, it’s probably waterproof, and look, you can squish it.”

Ghoul could have sworn he heard Kobra choke off a laugh, and it made him bolder. A smile came to his face that felt like he was splitting his wound open, but he couldn’t stop. “What does set it off is a pop detonator. You’ve been to the Zones; you know what a pop detonator is.” So carefully, he reached up with his other hand to hold the clump of C-4 and pull his tethered hand away, showing Korse the detonator wire tied to his fingers. Korse’s brow furrowed darkly. Ghoul knew he’d caught on.

“So if you ghost me, or Poison, or Jet Star, or the Kobra Kid,” Ghoul finished, “I drop this and you get your asses blown to high heaven.”

Poison let out a laugh, a big, “Ha ha ha! Fuckin’ Mexican standoff!” crow of victory.

But Korse didn’t look defeated. He looked even colder. Something clipped shut behind his eyes, and Ghoul knew he’d made some kind of mistake.

“Any losses we sustain are permissible,” Korse said to the Scarecrow. It didn’t click in Ghoul’s head until he said, “A draculoid wall, if you please.”

The Scarecrow moved their hands. Poison shouted, “Fuck!” and Ghoul hit the floor before the word left his mouth. The world turned white as blaster shots screamed overhead. Korse and the Scarecrow were gone, protected behind their legion of shooting, expendable draculoids. White noise and the spidery spiral crack of bulletproof glass giving under pressure. Then a hand, grabbing him. Ghoul reached for Jet and Kobra because fuck no he was not leaving them behind. Something dug through his shoulder. Then, “Jump! Ghoul, jump!” Poison.

Ghoul jumped.

He flung himself at the window and felt the crash and give, the glass giving way as he and Kobra hit it. He with his shoulder, Kobra with his heel. Ghoul went tumbling into open air, turned an overhead flip, and crashed hard on his heels on concrete. He rolled. Slammed all his weight into the middle of his back and got the air punched out of him. Needles and agony shot up the bones in his legs. He tried to choke in air, watching stars poke holes through the white sky above him after his head cracked back onto the pavement. He thought he slipped for a minute, down into unconsciousness.

“Fucking Destroya, I have to do everything around here.”

There was an arm under him, hoisting him upright.

“Get up, Ghoulie, everyone’s waitin’ on you,” said someone familiar. That sounded like a good idea, getting up. Ghoul shuffled his feet under him and clutched a blue-clad shoulder, propelling himself towards… yeah! The van. Dr. Death and Show Pony’s new van. Needed paint.

“Pony!” he said, trying to turn and focus on their face. “It’s you!”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Pony said, and dumped him in the back of the van like a sack of potatoes. Oh, man, he was glad to see Pony. Ghoul lifted his head and counted six boots. Good. That one was Poison. That one was Jet because they were red. And that one was Kobra because they turned in a little bit. They were all here. In the van, speeding away. His head hurt. He wanted sweet potatoes. His body hurt. Sweet potatoes would fix it. Probably. Pony Potatoes. Party Poison. No, that wasn’t right. He…

Chapter Text

The van swerved and Ghoul jerked awake. He immediately regretted it.

The seams of his skull blazed and he pressed his eyes closed again, willing the light outside to go away. Everything he was feeling was painful—something shooting through his shoulder, his cheek, his knees. What was under his head was soft, though, and that was okay.

“Ghoul?”

“Mm.” He couldn’t put a face to the voice, but he knew it was a good voice, one that wouldn’t try to shoot him. He wanted five more minutes.

“Hey, Fun Ghoul.”

Jet. It was Jet Star speaking, Jet Star’s hand in his hair. Ghoul squinted up at him and his face swam into focus amidst a white blur.

“Hey,” Jet said. Ghoul smiled before knowing why, but it caught up to him that Jet’s eyes were bright, if tired. There were no purple veins in his neck. Ghoul’s head was laying on his lap, his ear pressed to his stomach. The faint pulse he could feel in Jet’s abdomen pumped steady and slow.

“You’re okay,” Ghoul said. Relief washed through him so strongly he felt it bleed through his chest. His bruised, hurting chest. Then, because it was very urgent that Jet knew, he reached up with a hand that felt like a club to pat his face and say, “I love you.”

Poison, out of Ghoul’s sight, went, “Aw.”

“You’re concussed,” Jet said. He combed Ghoul’s hair out of his eyes. “I love you, too.”

“Ghoul? You awake back there?” Dr. Death. Ghoul twisted to look up at the front of the van—oh, because he and Jet were on the floor, that made sense—where they’d ripped out the seat to make a nice space for Dr. Death’s wheelchair. Probably not safe, but what the hell. They’d done it with the last van; it was easier to just roll up to the front rather than load the chair and the DJ separately into the van. A man needed to move quick, after all.

“Don’t wanna be,” Ghoul said.

“Don’t go to sleep,” Pony said from the driver’s seat. Then it all came rushing back to Ghoul. His memories came like fragments of a massive broken window pane. Sharp images of a handful of Comp 4 and jumping out a window. Of freefall. Of a little girl with a halo.

“Where are we?” he asked, trying to push himself upright to see out the windshield. “How’d we get here?” Jet grabbed him and held him down.

“We’re Mars roving,” Jet said. “We were all pretty…” He twirled a finger next to his ear, making a loopy face. “So I don’t know how, but Pony got us out.”

“Magic,” Pony supplied.

“You’ve been out for about five minutes,” Jet said.

Ghoul groaned. “Feels like longer.” Jet made a noise of sympathy and kept stroking his hair. He sighed. He loved Jet Star. He was going to hire him to be his pillow forever. He was so goddamn sleepy, he was going to take a nap right here.

“Hey,” Jet said. He snapped his fingers next to Ghoul’s ear. “Nuh-uh, don’t go to sleep.”

Ghoul griped at him and forced his eyes open. “I don’t like you,” he said.

Poison laughed, and then said, “Ghoul?”

“Yeah?”

“How come that C-4 didn’t go off?” he asked.

Ghoul didn’t have to reach far for that memory. He grinned, but then toned it down a few watts when he felt his cheek crack again. He used his good arm to dig around in his vest pocket until he found what he was looking for. Then he held a wire-less detonator out in his palm, angling his arm back so Poison could see without Ghoul having to do any more painful twisting.

Poison went silent for a beat, then he got it. “Oh, you son of a bitch,” he said. He took the disarmed detonator out of Ghoul’s palm. Ghoul could just feel him wind back to throw it, but then think better of it. “So you never armed that Comp 4,” he said. “You just squished the end of the wire into it and made them think it was attached to a detonator.”

“Mm-hmm,” Ghoul said, and let himself be smug for a little bit. He could be smart sometimes if he was so inclined. Party and Jet didn’t have all the brains, no matter how much they liked to think it. “Lost my C-4 on the street, though.”

“I’ll get you some more for your birthday,” Jet said.

Ghoul confessed his undying love for Jet Star again and tried to hug him, but moving his arm hurt, so he just kind of laid there and tried to radiate his feelings out through his skin. Then he meant to turn and say, “Kobra, how’s your leg?” but it came out as, “Kooobra…?”

“I broke my leg,” Kobra said. He didn’t sound too upset about it. Ghoul whipped his head around, ignoring the shot of pain through his neck.

Kobra and Poison were on the floor, too, Kobra crumpled small enough for Poison to tuck under his arm. He had his leg stretched out in front of him, and it looked like someone had screwed his foot on sideways. He’d unlaced his boot and slipped it off.

“Oh,” Ghoul said.

“Yeah, kinda blows,” Kobra said, picking blood out from under his fingernail.

The van hit a bump and Pony hissed through their teeth in sympathy for their injured passengers. “Sorry,” they said. “We’re in Zone 2.” Kobra winced at the movement and tried to hide it in Poison’s shoulder. Ghoul could just feel Jet frown above him.

“You did this all for me,” he said. Ghoul knew it had been coming. The guilt always came after the firefight, in the quiet moments where they sat together and licked their wounds, trying to blame themselves for everything that could have gone better.

“Yeah,” Poison said. “And we’d do it again.”

Ghoul buried his face in Jet’s stomach and went, “Mm-hmm.”

“You got hurt for me,” Jet said, and he sounded so sad Ghoul bore the pain in his shoulder to move his arms and wrap them around Jet’s waist. He’d either been shot or broken his shoulder. Probably shot. He didn’t care too much either way.

“You’re family, Jet, we’ll always bleed for you,” Kobra said, sounding so sincere it made Ghoul feel all mushy inside.

That time it was Pony who went, “Aw.” Ghoul felt Jet laugh.

“Hey,” Ghoul said, peering up at Jet. “How come you’n Poison aren’t beat up? You fell, too.”

“I didn’t do a front flip out the window,” Jet said.

“I didn’t crack my head on the pavement,” Poison said.

“Oh, fuck you,” Ghoul said, and went back to hiding in Jet’s shirt. He didn’t smell too good, but that was okay, because Ghoul didn’t either. In the following quiet, Pony turned on Cherri Cola’s broadcast and kept the volume low. Ghoul didn’t miss the way Dr. Death-Defying smiled with pride as Cherri wound down the tunes and started in on his poetry segment with the airwave grace of an albatross.

Ghoul listened to the soft voices—Cherri Cola’s, Poison’s, Kobra’s—and let his mind wander. He wanted it to fall still so he could sleep for about a month, but Jet would just shake him awake if that happened. His thoughts turned inward, towards a dark, cold room. Towards a tank full of viscous blue liquid and a little intubated girl, frozen in time. A special, special girl with a halo. Who Ghoul had a duty to, even though he didn’t know her name.

“We have to go back for her,” he said.

No one asked why or who, because Ghoul knew they had felt it, too. That the girl was special, somehow larger than her eight-ish years and tiny frame.

“Yeah,” Poison said. “We do.”

"I hope you don't mean right now," Dr. Death said.

"Yeah, I'll just walk right in," Kobra said.

Poison rolled his eyes. "No," he said. "Captain's orders, tomorrow's a day off."

"I'm not calling you Captain," Kobra said.

"If it's anything like our last day off I don't want it," Jet said.

"Nothin' bad can happen if we sleep the whole day," Ghoul said, letting his eyes drop closed.

Jet grabbed the uninjured side of his face. "Nuh-uh, fucker."

"Oh, fuck you," Ghoul said mildly. He smiled at Jet, the whole and cured and loyal Jet Star. His best friend. Healthy again save for needing a nap and a few more stitches. In that, at least, they had what they came for. Even if they’d encountered something much bigger in Battery City, they had their Jet Star back.

Midday desert sun beamed through the van windows in slices. Ghoul watched the dusties dance inside them and thought about the girl as the spin and rumble of tires over old asphalt carried them home.