4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Two More Mouths
The delivery driver is in the toilet. They have minutes — maybe less — to unload tent boxes before Luke's hijacked truck is reported stolen on the other side of reality. Exhaustion makes tempers fray and apologies stumble out half-formed. Then Jamie lifts his shirt, and Paul dicovers that he was hiding something that makes Paul's injured foot feel obscene to mention.
Luke arrives like chaos incarnate — hijacking a delivery truck mid-route, the driver oblivious in a bathroom somewhere on the other side of the Portal. Tent boxes fly from truck to dust in a frantic race against discovery, and in the exhaustion that follows, Paul snaps at Jamie for no good reason. The apology comes quickly, awkwardly. Then Jamie lifts his shirt.
The wound is worse than Paul imagined wounds could be. Angry red, swollen, weeping — a coal burn that has become something far more serious. Paul has spent all morning cataloguing his own suffering whilst Jamie worked in silence, carrying weight that must have sent agony radiating through his chest with every movement.
"We don't have a fucking doctor." The words crack something open in Jamie that can't be closed again.
Then a dog barks. Impossible, absurd, unmistakable. Henri bounds through the dust, followed by Duke in Luke's arms, and Jamie's face transforms through joy to horror to rage in the space of seconds. The shove lands exactly where it shouldn't. The wound ruptures. And Jamie delivers his verdict on everything Luke has built:
"Welcome to the fucking nightmare."
