by Chloe Garner
They ran.
***
She didn’t have any money or a bus pass, but somehow Trevor managed to talk her past the driver and into a seat in the back where a light overhead kept flickering. About ten minutes later, it went out for good.
“So where are we going?” Lizzie asked.
“You ride until you get off,” he answered, curling down in the seat and putting his knees up high on the back of the seats in front of them. Lizzie looked at him for a minute, then shuffled down next to him. They rode with their fingers twined across their stomachs for a long time before he looked at her and spoke again.
“You get a lot of time to think, riding the bus around like this,” he said. She grinned.
“And what do you think about?” she asked.
“Oh, naked girls, how to find them, that kind of thing,” he said with a daredevil grin. She snickered and he looked up at the ceiling.
“I listen to other people,” he said. “They do their thinking and they tell me everything. I know where the kids go to make out where their parents won’t find them, and where the married people do it where their spouses won’t find them. I know where the kids go to beat each other up, and I know which lawyers chase around non-victims, looking for easy cases to settle. There’s a girl who rides this leg of the route every Tuesday to get another armload of books, and she reads them to herself all the way home. She’s on a Jack London kick, here lately.”
“Call of the Wild,” Lizzie said, and Trevor nodded.
“I think that’s where she started. Her mom hits her when she gets home from work and has had a bad day. No one sees the bruises but me. Sometimes I think about going and dropping a tree on her house, but then who would she have?”
“Jack London,” Lizzie said, nodding her understanding.
“We hurt people,” Trevor said. “I hurt people. We try not to, but sometimes things just get away from us. Some of the demons don’t care. They think it’s part of what we do. Unavoidable. Some of us do it on purpose. Look at the furlings like a weapon. Go sit in the same place for long enough without an angel to break it up, and things can blow up into something really big. Met a guy in DC who somehow had a dozen furlings, more, that just hunted rats and put them into people’s houses.”
“Points for creativity, I guess,” Lizzie said. He rolled his head back and forth.
“That’s nothing compared to the stuff I think up.”
“Like what?”
“They want me to cause an earthquake,” he said. “A huge one. They tell me where the lines in the ground are that they would need to hit. Just need enough of them to get really good and focused, and they’d just dive down into it and set it off.”
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t sleep within a mile of the spot anymore, in case they got a surge and decided to go for it,” he said. “It would be fun, though. Watch the buildings dance and the cars shake? Maybe open up a hole in the ground and let things fall in…”
His eyes went glassy for a second, and she frowned.
“That’s not funny,” she said. He shook his head.
“No, it isn’t. Doesn’t stop me from thinking it.”
“That’s not healthy,” she said, before she could stop herself.
“You’re telling me,” he said. “I’m the one who’s having visions of it.”
“Really?” she asked. He nodded.
“I see all kinds of things I could do. Sometimes I rub my face and I’ve flipped someplace else and I’m just sitting there watching hundreds of people die.”
“That’s awful.”
“At least I can tell the real ones from the temptations,” he said. “Most of them can’t. They don’t know if it’s happened, happening, going to happen, or just idle fancy from the furlings.”
Lizzie shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I like night and I’m not going to waste this one talking about furlings being sadistic.”
“What are they?” Lizzie asked.
“No one knows,” Trevor said. “No one I’ve met, anyway. They’re not real, in the way you’re real. I can touch one, if I ever get close enough. I know that they’re there. But they can decide that they want to do something, and they just go crash into it and then they aren’t anymore.”
“Is that how they work?” Lizzie asked. Trevor nodded.
“That’s how they’ll have killed Lara. Just threw themselves at her one after the next after the next until she popped.”
The idea made Lizzie queasy.
“Ew.”
He nodded.
“It’s how most angels go. It’s actually kind of hard to kill us, because we can see the accidents waiting to happen. Furlings have to gang up on us to do it. But it costs a lot fewer of them to kill her than she’d take out over even a month, so when they make up their minds to do it, they just do it.”
“That’s…” She’d been about to say insane, but she hadn’t meant it like the word meant, to him, and she swallowed it. She meant that it was unbelievable.
Well. It wasn’t like she believed it.
Lara died in an accident.
“You could prove it,” she said suddenly, sitting up a fraction. “If you wanted to. Couldn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you can see the accidents as they’re about to happen, couldn’t you prove it?”
“Thought that’s what I’d been doing,” he said. “Take you to watch, and then sit and watch it happen.”
“But you don’t tell me what’s going to happen,” she said. “It’s all this big mystery.”
“You think I get a memo in advance telling me?” he asked. “Ask Robbie what he’s going to do, and he’ll at least tell you he doesn’t know. The furlings don’t talk, except to Sybil.”
“Do they really talk to her?” Lizzie asked.
“I haven’t got a clue,” he answered. “I don’t know if she knows. Sybil had it rougher than Robbie, growing up, from what bits I can get out of her, and there isn’t anyone who’s going to pull her back from the edge. Not anymore.”
Lizzie got a cold chill and she shifted down lower into her seat, leaning against Trevor’s shoulder.
“I want to help them,” she said. “I just wish I knew how.”
“You can destroy the furlings,” he said. “Not all of them. There are always going to be more, but there are too many, and it puts a load on all of us, trying to manage them.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I…”
“You don’t believe that that’s what’s wrong with any of us,” he said. “I know.”
“Do you ever think about how to just get rid of them once and for all?” Lizzie asked.
“They’re here for a reason,” Trevor said.
“But they make your life awful,” she said. He shifted up and looked around, then stood.
“We’re here,” he said, and they shuffled off of the bus and onto a dark street. There were street lights down the street from them about a block, but nothing but shadows where they were, now.
“Where are we?”
“This is closer to hooligan central,” he said, looking up. “The lights don’t do so well, here.”
She heard cars, but they were a ways away. The interstate, maybe. Maybe just a highway. She didn’t know her way around town very well, yet.
“This is where you live?”
“For right now,” he said. The air had an oily, industrial smell to it, over top of dust and exhaust. It wasn’t unpleasant, in the cool of the night air, but she imagined it might have been suffocating on really hot days, especially if it smelled that way inside.
“Lead the way, I guess,” she said, and he put his arm around her waist.
“So you don’t get lost,” he said.
“You could have a normal life, if they didn’t exist,” she said. “Don’t you want that?”
“How could I?” he asked. “I’ve never known what it was.”<
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“Liar,” she said and he laughed. “Seriously. If you could just get rid of them all, what would you do?”
“That’s not how it works,” he said.
“I know,” she pushed back, “but what if?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want your life. Little box that’s your allocated space, job you go to every day and do the same things and see the same people. Car to get from one place to another and then back again. Honestly, it sounds like hell.”
They turned off of a dark street onto a darker alley, where her feet found the ground wasn’t clear. Newspaper and plastic bags brushed away from in front of her, and she caught a loose brick with the side of her shoe.
“I’d tell you to watch your step, but that isn’t going to help you much,” he said.
“No, my apartment with a nice, lit, functioning elevator is really looking bad, right now,” she teased, and he laughed.
“It’s my life,” he said. “I choose to be here until I choose to be someplace else.”
She had a quiet realization that she considered before putting it into words.
“This really is going to be a drug house, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said with the same quiet. “There are a lot of us here, the hooligans I mean, but there are more of the kind of people you’d recognize. People who couldn’t get a foot on the merry-go-round and ended up kind of tossed off, out here.”
“The kind of people I help every day,” she said. “You would help them, if you could, wouldn’t you?”
“Only if they want it,” he answered, and there was a warning there. Robbie didn’t always want help, either. He’d hardly ever wanted the kind of help they could offer him, in point of fact.
“We have to try,” she said. “We can’t just abandon them.”
“And what if trying is worse than nothing?” Trevor asked, leaning into a door that ground against the floor like the top hinge was broken. The floor here was thick with trash and was beginning to smell like unwashed humans.
“How do you stay clean?” Lizzie asked. “If this is where you live.”
“Various strategies to that,” he said. “My best one is to break into Robbie’s and Lara’s house from time to time and use the shower. A lot of them do.”
Lizzie nodded. If she had a group of friends that lived like this, she’d have an open door policy, too.
“Staying clean is important,” she said. He edged her around a lump on the floor and she tried to see if it was a bag of trash or someone sleeping there, but she couldn’t work it out in the light she had.
“Surprised you know that,” Trevor said after another moment.
“Robbie used to come home with skin rashes and infections because he couldn’t stay clean,” she said.
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “I guess he would have.”
To say nothing of his teeth, Lizzie thought. Drugs did terrible things to people’s teeth, but lack of care was hard to separate out.
They went up a set of stairs that had a single, bare bulb that had resisted whatever had attacked the rest of its kindred, and then onto a floor with windows on all four sides. Many of them were broken, but it was less dismal than the lower floor, for having a natural light source. The floor was covered with trash and people, and again Lizzie couldn’t tell which was which.
He went to one wall where there was a small room with a skew door that hadn’t closed in a long time.
“Privilege,” he said, leading her through the doorway into a room with a mattress on the floor.
“This is where you sleep?” she asked.
“Your nice new clothes aren’t here,” he said. “They’re in a trash bag behind a shop downtown. You know where they pick up trash and where they don’t, and you can be pretty sure about keeping things safe there.”
She really did turn and press her nose against his shoulder now, taking one long, deep breath.
Nothing.
No urine, no waste, none of the other sharp, unpleasant smells she picked out from underneath the predominant ones, up here.
Just dirt and sweat and oil and leather, the soft smell of a man who worked, but who was rather tidy about it.
Stronger than anything else was the leather.
“You don’t smell like you sleep here,” she said. “Are you lying to me?”
She hadn’t meant it to be an accusation. She had meant to be playful, but she was knocked back by how important it was to her that he not lie to her, not about this. Not about him.
“No,” he said. “Sybil and Dennis will be over in that corner, there, and I expect Tristan is around here somewhere.”
“Then how?” she asked. “How do you not smell like this?”
He shook his head.
“This is where I live, and it’s where I belong. But I’m the demon. I don’t sink down into it.”
“King of the hooligans,” someone whispered, and Lizzie turned to see a bald head and a forked tongue, then Dennis scuttled away again. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard his voice before.
She would have sat, taken it in for a minute, really try to understand it - that had been her habit with every hint she’d ever gotten about where Robbie went and how he lived when he wasn’t functional - but she couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting down on that mattress, and the floor was worse. Something squeaked in the darkness, and something else hissed. She wished she could see Trevor’s face more clearly.
“You shouldn’t live like this,” she whispered. She didn’t want them to hear, out there; she didn’t want to offend them, but it turned her stomach.
“I should live anywhere I want to,” Trevor said. “I belong where I say I belong. I am the demon. I am chaos.”
“And if you think that I’m the angel, then I am order,” she said. “But you belong more with me than you do here. You got along with Lara.”
“You think that order and chaos are enemies,” he said.
“Aren’t they?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “But they’re part of the same system. They don’t have to hate each other.”
“I won’t ever hate you,” Lizzie said.
“The angel isn’t very good at hating people,” Trevor said, nudging her. “Come on. I may belong here, but you don’t. I wanted you to see, and it’s better at night than it is during the day.”
She shuddered, and he pulled her arm through his, escorting her back out of the building and onto the street.
“And I thought that Robbie’s neighborhood was bad,” she said.
“It was a lot nicer before Robbie and Lara moved in,” he said.
“Are you suggesting it was their fault?” Lizzie asked, and he looked over at her.
“Take what you want from it,” he said. “I’m just saying what I saw.”
She shook her head.
“If I’m allowed to say what I see, you really do put a lot of order into a random system, with the way you see the world.”
He laughed.
“You know, I don’t think in three lifetimes, I’d have ever seen it like that.”
“You personify randomness,” she said. “Give meaning to random events, and attach yourself to how they got that way.”
“I see,” he said. “You think it’s a coping mechanism for things I can’t control.”
“You can see how it would look like that,” she said.
“But only if I explain them to myself like that, after they happen,” he said. “I watch them happen.”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” she said, and he tucked her elbow tighter against his side.
“I don’t feel like arguing, anyway,” he said.
They walked without talking much for a few minutes, back toward the light, then he turned abruptly, away from the light, away from the sound of cars.
“I don’t want to go back into the middle of them,” he said. “They don’t spend as much time where there aren’t as many people.”
“Okay,” Lizzie answered, letti
ng him do what he wanted. They walked and they walked, past the point where the sidewalks gave out, past windows and driveways, until there wasn’t anything.
“You come out here often?” Lizzie asked.
“Not as much as I used to,” Trevor told her. “Too much going on. Too many people who need me.”
“Robbie thought you’d actually leave,” Lizzie said. She could see the profile of his face, lit from the other side, a sharp nose and chin, downcast eyes, thoughtful.
“I will, someday,” he said. “Just not today.”
“How did it end up, with your girlfriend in Paris?”
“I didn’t go back,” he said. “I figure she’s figured out that I’m not coming back, by now.”
“Bastard,” she said, not unkindly, and he laughed.
“Demon.”
“I won’t put up with that,” she said.
“Oh?” he asked.
“Nope,” she said. “You disappear on me, I’ll hunt you down.”
“And why would you do that?” he asked. She grinned at the darkness.
“Can’t you tell?” she asked. “This is what it sounds like when I’m hitting on you.”
“Ah,” he said, tipping his head back to look up at the stars. “I’ve never had an angel hit on me.”
“I’m not the angel,” she said. “I don’t think I ever will be. But I care about you, if that’s good enough.”
He laughed, loud, from deep in his stomach, just once.
“I’m the demon, darling. If there’s anyone less likely to tell you what to do with yourself, I’ve never met him.”
She sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder, smiling.
She had no idea what she was doing.
She kind of liked it, like that.
***
The dark got deeper and darker as they went. Lizzie checked her phone once and found it was three in the morning. She was energized unlike she could remember being during the day in a long time, and Trevor was moving more and more like he had as they’d gone into the school, up on his toes, energetic, like he could barely contain himself. She let him go after a time, so that he wouldn’t keep bumping into her.
Things around them rattled and skittered and hissed, and she wasn’t sure if they were animate or inanimate in the gusty wind.