My heart was beating so fast that my head felt tight. Putting my hands up in front of me, I feigned surrender, all while backing up. As soon as I ran into the guy behind me, I bent my elbows and swung them back, hard, into his stomach. If I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed him. Ass blossoms like that, they don’t deserve to fucking live, it’s them or us. But I didn’t have a gun or anything, and I was fucked up and didn’t even have a crowbar.

He fell down and we pushed through the circle of them. I saw flashes, something making a quick motion in the dark. I ran and ran and it wasn’t until blocks later that I realized there were fewer of us than there were supposed to be.

“Lux? Lux?” I said. Her tall, thin frame was the one that was missing. I leaned over my knees and tried to catch my breath. “Where the fuck is Lux?”

“I don’t know, Jesse,” José said. “We gotta get outta here. We have to get back to the station.”

“No, we need to find our goddamn friend, you shit socket,” I said. Would I have done it for someone else? Even José or Sebastian? I didn’t know. But it was Lux that was missing. “Come on.”

We circled back around, going a block out of our way. The guys were gone from the spot, but Lux was still there. Laying on the ground. Bleeding everywhere. Unconscious.

“Is she dead?” Sebastian asked as we knelt next to her.

I felt for a pulse in her neck. It was there, but just barely.

“She’s alive,” I said. “She needs to get to the hospital. We have to carry her there.”

She was heavy. We had to keep stopping every couple of blocks to put her down, even though the twins were pretty strong. After a while, she started making these horror-movie noises in her throat. Scary as it was, at least we knew she was still alive.

We thought we knew where the hospital was, but when we got there, we were wrong. I was getting sweaty and frantic as a pig fucker on a goat farm. The feeling reminded me of when I was a kid and my mom used to get too drunk to cook before my dad got home, so I’d try to do it. And after about an hour, standing over the heat of the stove, knowing how my dad would react if he came home and there was no food, I’d start panicking and sweating. That was how I felt right then. Fucking trauma.