Absolute Unit

by Nick Kolakowski

  “Pussy,” Big Jim says, and fires again. This shot punches through one of Pink Bunny’s plastic eyes, shattering it, and the furry flops backward, gun clattering to the pavement.

  Angry Fox spins and yanks the trigger of his rifle, so violently that the barrel jerks up and the first burst clatters over the Mountain’s head. Big Jim pivots on his heel and fires three times at Angry Fox, but the shots sing wide, cracking the rear window of a mini-car.

  Angry Fox readjusts and tries to squeeze off another burst, but the weapon clicks impotently, jammed. Screaming through his mask, he works the bolt, glancing frantically at Big Jim, who ejects the clip from his pistol and reaches beneath his jacket for a reload. Big Jim seems as calm as a man on the shooting range.

  The Mountain shoves past Trent, ready to tear Angry Fox’s head clean off. We twist a tendon in Trent’s knee, and as he drops, we lash his left arm straight into the Mountain’s solar plexus. No matter your size, it’s a vulnerable spot.

  The Mountain grunts and drops the taser. We snatch it in midair, thumb already pushing the trigger, and jam the sparking tip into the soapy river flowing for the gutter. With a crackle and the sudden stink of ozone, the water around Angry Fox turns electric, and he begins a spastic jig, rifle waving like an orchestra conductor’s baton.

  Yet we’ve already failed. The fast-rushing water fed the puddle around Angry Fox as well as the pools around Big Jim and (until he stepped beside us) the Mountain. The way we envisioned it, the electricity would have zapped everyone except Trent and Carrie, who stand on slightly elevated patches of parking lot. Maybe the potency of electricity drops exponentially the further you go from the source.

  Well, screw us for dreaming big.

  In any case, Angry Fox is toast, while Big Jim and the Mountain are still standing, and this is a huge problem.

  Angry Fox’s finger twitches on the trigger of his weapon, and maybe that frees up the firing mechanism because it sprays another burst that smacks the Mountain in the chest. A pink mist of aerosolized blood drifts over us as the big man groans and collapses.

  Angry Fox falls at the same moment, face-down in the puddle, gray smoke wafting from his fur. We hope he’s dead.

  Screaming, Big Jim empties his pistol into the prone furry.

  If he wasn’t dead before, Angry Fox sure is now.

  Breathing loudly though his nostrils, Big Jim ejects his empty clip and reaches beneath his jacket. How many reloads does he tuck under there? The correct answer is “too many.”

  The driver of the van, realizing that Big Jim means to riddle him with holes, leaves a burning-rubber cloud as he reverses out of the parking lot. He’s framed momentarily in the passenger window: a chipmunk with a huge overbite and wide eyes that might have been comic under different circumstances. The van stays in reverse as it ping-pongs down the alley, smashing trashcans and fences, before disappearing from view.

  “Trent,” Big Jim says. “Drop that taser.”

  Trent turns to find Big Jim pointing the pistol at him. We are in the worst possible spot: too far away from Big Jim to give him the rigorous hand-to-hand smacking he deserves, but also too far from the machine gun that Angry Fox dropped when he did the electric boogie.

  “You, um, can’t kill me,” Trent says, tossing the taser aside. “I’m the one who knows the combination to my uncle’s safe, remember? You recall that little detail, dumbass?”

  Ah, Trent: growing some balls at last. Especially when we’ve flooded him with dopamine.

  “You forget we don’t have to kill you,” Big Jim waves at Trent’s crotch with the pistol. “We can do all kinds of horrible things while keeping you alive.”

  “Go ahead.” Trent grins, but the corners of his lips waver. “I dare you.”

  “Fine.” Big Jim shrugs, raises the weapon, and pulls the trigger.

  The bullet zips through the meat of Trent’s left shoulder as neat as you please. His stunned nerves need another moment to send this information to his brain, but when it happens, the pain is intense, a firestorm that smashes over us.

  Trent screams and clutches his shoulder, blood squirting between his fingers. Our tendrils nearest the wound report back: damage to the muscle and some vessels, bone and arteries intact. It’s a minor wound, which should provide some comfort to Trent right before Big Jim blows another hole through his middle.

  The gangster shrugs. “That was just a love tap, kid. Next up: your nuts. Or we could hurt Carrie . . . ” He turns to the line of mini-cars, as does Trent.

  Carrie is missing.

  Big Jim spins, confused—just as Carrie, rising behind him, brings down a short length of pipe on the back of his head. He collapses to the pavement, pistol spinning beneath a mini-car.

  Kill him, we tell Trent. Otherwise he’ll never stop hunting you.

  I can’t kill anyone!

  You did it this morning!

  Shut up! Trent shudders, his knees trembling. Don’t talk about it.

  Carrie tosses the pipe aside and runs to Trent. “Fucker shot you,” she says.

  That’s what we love about humans: always stating the obvious.

  “I don’t think it’s bad.” Trent’s voice quakes. “I need a hospital, though.”

  “They’ll ask how you got shot.” Pressing her hand over his hand on the wound, Carrie escorts him toward her delivery vehicle. “We’ll tell them it was a stray, okay? Happens all the time.”

  Trent kisses her on the cheek. “You’re amazing.”

  Atta boy!

  16.

  Carrie stomps on the gas, propelling her car down the alley at its laughable top speed. “Duct tape in the glove compartment,” she says.

  Trent retrieves the tape and wraps three long strips of it around his shoulder. How am I looking in there?

  Good, we reply. His blood loss slows to a seep as the vessels clot, and his other vitals seem normal enough, considering everything he’s endured over the past several hours. Maybe they can set him up in a hospital room next to Bill.

  At the end of the alley, Carrie turns onto the main avenue without checking for traffic, leaving startled drivers honking in her wake. She takes a deep breath, exhales loudly, and destroys Trent’s fragile calm: “We messed up back there.”

  “No shit,” Trent yelps.

  “Big Jim’s expanding into cocaine. He hates the stuff, says it means too many cartel people up his ass, but since the state’s legalizing weed soon, he’s got to find another line of business.”

  “Why doesn’t he just sell legal weed?”

  “Because he’s a gangster. You think the government’s just going to let him go legit, without penalties? Come on. And without the drug money, the pizza place goes down . . . ”

  “How is that possible? You’re doing nonstop deliveries.”

  “Three-quarters of my deliveries are weed, dumbass. It’s the perfect cover. You think the cops are going to stop some girl in a tiny delivery car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh?”

  Trent grins. “You’re too cute not to stop.”

  Carrie locks him with a gaze that could melt steel. “You say that because you have no idea how terrifying it is to have a cop pull you over, start flirting, try to get your number. The power imbalance of it. The threat, even if I wasn’t carrying a pound of weed in the back.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, you’re just a young white guy. You have no clue how the world really works.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “When they were carrying you downstairs earlier? Big Jim said he wanted me to start delivering cocaine instead of weed, which I’m definitely not cool with. I guess he has a new supply, which his friend Frank was supposed to deliver. But your uncle wiped out Frank, and so nobody knows where all that coke actually is.”

  We send an image up Trent’s brainstem: Frank opening the trunk of his Cadillac to reveal the wrapped body inside. That’s the detective’s mother, we tell him. The detective shot her over that coke.


  Trent moans: Was that body in the trunk when we crashed?

  Yes.

  Oh God! The cops didn’t say anything!

  Probably because the detective was dirty. They know something like that gets out, it’ll wreck the department. Another image: Trent marching through Big Jim’s restaurant, spied by the kitchen staff. Anyone says they saw you around Big Jim, the cops might try to make you the scapegoat.

  Trent wipes his sweaty hands on his pants. If Big Jim doesn’t kill us first.

  “You okay?” Carrie asks.

  “I’m in so much trouble.” Trent buries his face in his newly dry palms.

  “We both are.” She reaches over and takes his left hand in her right, squeezes hard. “But we’re going to get through this.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But we don’t have a choice, do we?”

  “No, I guess we don’t.”

  “We might actually have some leverage.” Carrie jabs a thumb over her shoulder. “See in the back there?”

  Trent turns to the rear cargo area, wincing as the movement sends a sparkler of pain up his shoulder. “You’re delivering those pizzas?”

  “Oh, those aren’t pizzas. Open the top one.”

  Inside the box, Trent finds a cluster of glassine baggies filled with white powder. “This is coke?”

  “Yep, the last of Big Jim’s. That’s why he needed the new shipment so badly. But in the meantime, I was supposed to deliver this.”

  Trent closes the box. “There’s cocaine in all of these?”

  “And some other stuff, too, all of it hardcore. If Big Jim’s coming after us—which he will—maybe that gives us, I don’t know, something to negotiate with.”

  “If he doesn’t just skip right to the killing. Maybe we should have killed him when we had the chance.”

  “I thought about it, but I can’t do it. I can’t have that kind of mark on my soul.” Her eyes flick to the rearview mirror. “Oh shit.”

  Trent checks his side mirror, which frames the black van trailing them a few cars back. Dusk creeps down, the orange sun slanting over the buildings at a low angle, spotlighting the enormous chipmunk behind the wheel. Maybe he was lurking around the neighborhood, hoping that Trent and Carrie would drift into his path—whatever the case, he’s locked on our tail.

  “Can we outrun him?” Trent asks.

  “Keep dreaming. This car goes forty miles an hour if I floor it.”

  “Maybe we can lose him at the hospital. He can’t walk around with that weird head on.” The bitter fear-juices in Trent’s blood suggest he doesn’t believe that at all. He turns on the radio and cycles to a news station, but we’ve entered a two-block canyon of taller office buildings and the newscaster’s voice dissolves in static after mentioning something about a hazardous incident, some kind of infection.

  Bothered by the crackling, Carrie slaps the radio off. “If they report anything about the mayor, they’ll say he had a heart attack at home or something.”

  “Yep. We’re the ones who know the truth.”

  “More crap to worry about. But hey, at least one good thing came of this.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You seem a lot more confident.”

  “Getting good advice from those voices in my head.” Trent, checking his side mirror again, startles. In the rightmost lane, maybe three car lengths behind the Furry Van of Doom, is a black car with Detective Banks at the wheel.

  “Actually,” Trent groans. “I might have to take that last statement back.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s a detective behind us. Black car.”

  Carrie flicks her gaze to the review mirror, hisses through clenched teeth. “How do you know?”

  “She interrogated me this morning.”

  “Well, what the hell is she doing here?”

  “Following us. Don’t ask me why. No way we’ll outrun her.”

  “I still think we should go for the hospital. At least that gets rid of our furry problem.”

  Traffic increases, random cars slipping into the spaces between mini-car, detective car, and van. Everyone is hemmed in, reduced to a near-crawl. Three helicopters zip overhead. The chipmunk is two cars behind and doesn’t seem to care about anyone looking at him oddly. We almost admire his lunacy.

  Carrie swerves right at the next intersection without signaling, the van almost sideswiping the detective’s car as both vehicles turn to follow. The chipmunk offers Banks a thumbs-up.

  Banks returns the gesture.

  They know each other! Trent yells at us.

  Must be Detective Mott in that costume, we say. Where else would her partner be?

  Trent’s brainstem crackles with shock, and we give the well-worn dopamine gland a little pinch. Miracle of miracles, relaxation juice squirts out, calming Trent enough to keep him useful for the time being.

  The traffic around us drops away, the van closing the distance, Banks staying parallel. The mini-car is reduced to a piston rushing down the cylinder. We have enviable combat skills, even at the controls of Trent’s untrained body, but we sense our luck is starting to run low. How many bullets can any lifeform dodge in one day?

  We take another right, onto an avenue with a slight downgrade, and Carrie squeezes another few miles per hour from the mini-car’s tired engine. The white monolith of the hospital looms before us. Everything seems, if not totally okay, not absolutely screwed quite yet. But even that thought appears to jinx us, because there’s something weird in the road immediately ahead . . .

  “The hell?” Carrie asks, leaning forward.

  Three figures in white plastic suits stand behind an orange barrier, the twilight reflecting off clear bubble-helmets. A cop lurks behind them, his lower face covered with a bright yellow respirator of some kind. A giant white van blocks three of the road’s four lanes.

  The cop steps in front of the barrier and raises a gloved hand.

  Carrie taps the brakes. “Who are those people? What’s wrong?”

  The mini-car has slowed to a crawl. Two of the plastic-suited figures wave what look like glowing wands.

  “Something go wrong at the hospital?” Trent asks, his voice tight with worry.

  “I don’t know, okay?” Carrie clenches her jaw. “Hold on.”

  “Hold on?”

  “Can’t stay here.” Carrie rises out of her seat, both feet slamming the gas pedal into the floor. Its engine screeching like a ferret on crystal meth, the mini-car leaps at the barrier, and the stunned cop and hazmat workers waste a full two seconds waving their arms before they dive to the left. Carrie jerks the wheel, slamming through the right edge of the barrier, which shatters into plastic fragments that crack our windshield.

  Before Carrie can regain control of the swerving car, we clip the rear bumper of the van being used as a roadblock. Boom. With a crunch of steel, we go airborne. Trent squeezes his eyes shut, but his body becomes the meaty gyroscope through which we can feel the world tilting right. The mini-car lands on its side and slides, glass shattering, metal scraping, engine screaming—talons of sound that rip the world apart.

  17.

  We drift through a snowstorm.

  White particles flicker in the harsh light stabbing through broken glass. Snowdrifts rise on Trent’s hands and sift into the folds of his shirt, stick to the blood drying on his lips and forehead. We try to stick his tongue out, the better to collect some of it, but Trent’s body must have taken some damage during the crash, because moving it only a millimeter past Trent’s teeth sparks a wave of pain so intense that he moans—

  Stop complaining, we tell him. We’re trying to get you some medicine.

  What? I—

  Before he can say anything more, our efforts with his tongue are rendered moot, because a few flecks drift up his nose, and—zoom. Trent’s next words are lost in a screaming pleasure-storm, his nervous system exploding like the Fourth of July, his every cell a fireworks display, throbbing, pulsing, exploding�
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  My God, my universe, this is AMAAAAAAZING—

  This is why we exist. To feel, to experience, to taste everything this weird mixture of chemicals and physics we call life has to offer. Until this point, we were beginning to despair about our time inside Trent, who seemed mostly good for sampling all the pains and indignities that the human race could shell out. But now, in a crushed and overturned mini-car, we’ve hit our jackpot. The fireworks display is building, building, building until our cells flare white-hot and begin to melt in puddles of pure bliss, our every muscle turning liquid as we merge back into our Mother Earth, back to—

  And Carrie ruins it.

  Gripping Trent by the collar, she braces one foot against the dashboard and pulls with all her might. The door behind her slams open, spilling them onto the pavement. Trent, his cortex sparkling, feels no pain, his head rolling loosely on his neck. But Carrie is frantic, looking over her shoulder as she drags her ex-boyfriend across the cracked pavement in front of the hospital.

  Trent’s head flops forward, and we see what frightens her: a dozen men in hazmat suits trot in our direction, followed by the uniformed cop. Detective Banks, having stopped at the barrier, climbs out of her vehicle. Beside her, the chipmunk descends from the van and removes his oversized head, revealing—no surprises here—the sweaty head of Detective Mott.

  Our enemies march toward us, gaining speed. It’s the hazmat suits that scare us the most, because it means that something, somewhere, has gone world-endingly wrong. How will we continue to enjoy our drugs if all the drug dealers are bleeding from the eyes with some kind of hemorrhagic fever?

  “Oh, will you get the fuck up and help me,” Carrie yells, but Trent is befuddled by fatigue and the distractions of his amazing technicolor nervous system. We try to assist, snagging the tendons in Trent’s knees and pulling with all our might. This time, things work out a little better. He jerks upright, and we do our best to marionette him from within, but it’s so hard to make every limb move in the right order without him flopping on his face.

  You better put some effort in, we snap at him. Otherwise we’ll die.