“Oh, Ogden!” I said as I went over. “You’ve been shot.”
Almost like an echo, I heard Rex’s voice saying the same thing. “You’ve been shot.”
Kneeling next to Ogden, putting pressure on the wound while Claudia tried to bind it, I glanced back toward Rex and saw Cronos turning around, revealing three red splotches on his midsection, rapidly growing and spreading down his front. He looked down at his wounds then back up at Rex.
“Yes, I have.” Cronos turned and looked down at Roberta. “Traitor!”
He moved to kick her again, but Rex shoved him away. “I said that’s enough.”
Cronos stumbled again, but violently shoved Rex back. “Don’t you touch me.”
“Del,” Rex said. “You’re hurt. We need to get you fixed up. And then we need your help to stop Howard Wells.”
“This isn’t hurt, Leo!” he snapped. “You don’t know the meaning of ‘hurt.’ This is nothing compared to the pain I’ve been through. You wouldn’t be standing here if you’d been through what I have. But I’m better than you. Always have been. Stronger. Faster. Braver.”
He gave Rex another shove, and Rex stumbled back but didn’t fall.
“And you dare to tell me you need my help to stop Wells?! He was stopped. That problem was fixed. He’d soon be gone if you hadn’t gotten in the way.”
“We can stop him without killing millions of innocent people.”
Cronos laughed at that. “‘Innocent people…’”
“Look,” Rex said, in a soothing voice. “We all want the same thing here.”
“You don’t know what I want,” Cronos said, turning slightly, then hauling off with a mighty but clumsy swing at Rex, who ducked away from it easily. As Cronos stumbled to regain his footing, he glanced for a moment at me. “Or maybe you do.”
Rex followed his gaze, and as he did, Cronos lashed out again, this time connecting with Rex’s jaw, sending him staggering sideways.
“Stop it!” I yelled.
Rex spun out of his stagger with a thunderous punch of his own, a loud crack as he connected with Cronos’s chin.
Cronos’s head whipped to the side, then immediately snapped back. He gave Rex a dazed and deranged grin. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Cronos took another swing, and Rex evaded it and snuck a punch to Cronos’s gut, below the bullet holes. Cronos groaned, then growled.
I winced. “Enough, dammit!” I shouted out, getting to my feet.
“Keep the pressure on, Jimi,” Claudia said, grabbing my sleeve.
Ogden draped his good arm over his face. “Oh, man, that hurts.”
Cronos laughed again, thick and wet. “I see you’ve got a little bit of that killer instinct after all, don’t you, Leo?” He tried to kick Rex in the knee, but Rex skipped out of the way and punched him under his arm.
“We don’t have to do this,” Rex said.
“Careful, though,” Cronos said. “You don’t want to be too much of a killer. Jimi isn’t crazy about the murdering type. She prefers peaceful little weaklings.”
“Del, what the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.
Claudia grabbed my wrist and pushed my hand more firmly against Ogden’s arm. “Don’t let go,” she snapped, annoyed, as she fumbled with the tourniquet she was trying to tie.
Ogden groaned in pain.
“You know it’s true,” Cronos replied. “You could never be…friends…with someone capable of making the tough decisions, of doing the dirty work that needs to be done.”
“Del!” I called out from my place on the floor. “This isn’t about you or me or Rex. Don’t you understand?”
“This isn’t about any of us,” Rex said, straightening up out of his fighting stance. “It’s bigger than that. It’s about all of us.”
Cronos ignored me and stalked toward Rex. “You don’t get to decide what this is about,” he snarled.
“Okay, done!” Claudia said, sitting back.
I shot to my feet and ran toward Rex and Cronos, the dart gun in my hand, sticky with Ogden’s blood.
I didn’t know how many darts I had left, and Cronos was covered from head to toe in fabric that was apparently dart-proof, if not bullet-proof. Roberta groaned on the floor, and I thought about getting her gun, since I knew it would work—but I didn’t want to kill Del. I didn’t want to kill anyone. And I didn’t want him to call my bluff, either.
As I approached, Cronos roared and threw himself at Rex. Blood seeped from his stomach as he grabbed Rex around the throat and they both stumbled toward the gaping hole where the window had been.
“Del! Stop it!” I pleaded, but he continued to ignore me, driving Rex back, their feet shuffling through the broken glass that littered the floor, perilously close to the opening in the wall.
“Del, you’re badly hurt,” I said. “We need to get you help.”
“There’s not enough help in the world for me,” he said, his voice sounding sluggish. “Not in this world.”
“There is,” I said. “Doc Guzman can help.”
“Patch…patch me up so I can go to prison?” He laughed, bitterly, easing up for just a moment. Rex grabbed at Cronos’s hand, trying to pry it away from his neck. “You’ve seen what the nonks do to us out here, Jimi, out in the open. Can you imagine what they’d be like in prison?” Then he slammed Rex against the brick wall, next to the hole where the window had been, and Rex went slack, dazed by the blow.
I continued to approach them. Over the past several months, I had found myself shooting dart guns more than I ever would have expected, and by that point I felt surprisingly comfortable with them. But still, I knew this would be a tough shot. I raised the dart gun, took a deep breath, and said, quietly, “Del, look at me.”
His shoulders sagged slightly, but his hands remained rigid as he turned his head.
I aimed and pulled the trigger.
Almost instantaneously, Cronos let go of Rex and stepped away, clamping both hands over his right eye.
Rex slid down the wall, but stopped himself halfway down, bracing himself as he coughed his throat back into shape.
“Ouch! Dammit, Jimi!” Cronos said, almost whining, sounding for a moment just like Del. He pulled his hands away from his eye and held up the dart pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “You shot me in the eye,” he said.
He flicked away the dart and tore off his hood, and I saw that he was smiling. “Hell of a shot, actually,” he said, with a crooked grin that betrayed a mouth full of blood.
He laughed softly, and through the blood, through the terrible scars and the multiple splices, through everything else that had transpired to transform him, I saw my friend Del. I saw all the phases and ages, all the iterations we’d gone through together over the years as we tried to figure out who we were, who we were going to be, all the way back to when we were little kids, before his mom died, before my dad died, back to when life was simple and good. Or at least, back to before we had discovered it wasn’t.
For an instant, I smiled at the memories. “It’s okay, Del,” I said soothingly, walking slowly toward him. “It’s okay.”