A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  “One or two K. Definitely one,” Sharkie answers.

  Shasta scoffs and says, “Don’t let this shithead get you locked up again, Adrian.”

  “Swearing,” Adrian says, disgusted. Adrian doesn’t give a fuck if guys cuss. It bugs the shit out of him when bitches do, though. Old-fuckin’-fashioned I guess.

  Sharkie shoots back, “Why don’t you go back to that hospital, you sketchy cunt?”

  Adrian just says, “Hillary,” in a tone that says “watch yourself.”

  “Anyway, it’s no risk, man. Guy’s asleep. Out like a lighter.”

  “Light,” Shasta corrects.

  Sharkie looks at her hard and considers requesting that she be more polite but Adrian is looking at him harder so he lets it slide. He scratches his head and watches phonies walk out of the McDonalds next to Amoeba full as ticks. Fuck… Need to eat after I slam, man. Been a while…

  Adrian says, “One K?”

  Sharkie locks eyes with him, ignoring Shasta’s scowl.

  “Maybe two,” Sharkie says.

  Adrian walks with Sharkie down the sidewalk bordering the “Panhandle” to the south. Think of Golden Gate Park as a saucepan in profile. This section shoots off to the east like a short handle and is bordered by Fell street on the north and Oak street on the south until it terminates at Baker street north-south.

  Sharkie has informed Adrian that this weird guy with the expensive kit is passed out under some trees near the end of the Panhandle.

  Sharkie is an idiot, but he can come through with a great score on occasion. I did almost a year on one poorly executed attempt while his stupid ass outran the police, but if he really can get us something worth one to two thousand dollars, well… that’s a lot of smack. And I just might get some decent cucumber rolls and couscous from Whole Foods. Sharkie will spend what’s left of his after the heroin on garbage like Chocodiles and Taco Bell.

  Sharkie says, “Why do you still hang out with Shasta? She bugs, man.”

  “She is a lovely young lady and quite fond of my penis. The best fuck I’ve ever had, actually. Even though I have more experience with her overall, I’m sure you of all people should understand that, Hillary.”

  Yes, I’m fully aware of Sharkie’s interlude with the lovely, young Shasta. I just don’t care. Sharing and community must be held dearly as the base of our philosophy or we will become selfish and obsessed with commerce and objects like all these sad sacks driving by. We must liberate the greedy of their expensive luxuries for the greater good as well as their own. I see a world in which we share our women and food and resources. Other than heroin, of course. That’s all for me.

  “Yeah, well… whatever,” Sharkie responds, once again unable to conjure a witty retort.

  “So, what is this big tech piece that can net us so much?”

  Sharkie says, “It’s a sick video camera. I call this guy Camera Man ‘cause I’ve seen him in different parts of the city just filming stuff. Or video-ing, I guess. I think he’s fuckin’ crazy or somethin’ but his camera is real slick. Real new. I hadn’t seen him in a while… but he’s back now right down here.”

  “Hillary… If he’s crazy, how do we know the camera even works?”

  “I seen the lens zoom in and out and stuff. It works, man, don’t worry. I seen it.”

  Sharkie stops and pats Adrian on the shoulder then points toward a grove of trees in the Panhandle. Adrian can make out a supine form in the shade from a few of the trees, resting on a rucksack. They share a look and Adrian nods in the affirmative.

  Adrian follows Sharkie through the park, both forcing a casual pace. As they reach the shade of the trees, they become stealthier, sneaking up while looking all around for observers.

  “Camera Man” has a black on black SF Giants cap over his face and he’s snoring lightly. Adrian sees several weeks of facial growth on a part of the young man’s jawline poking out from one side of the cocked cap and a scar of some kind through the tangled thick of it. His recently close-cropped head is resting on a black canvas Australian Army rucksack and he’s wearing an old hooded German border guard jacket and dark grey, black, and blue digital camouflage BDUs with loose straps and black search and rescue boots with the funny ribs over the tips. All of it looks almost brand new. It’s like he raided a military surplus store… or got sponsored by one. Adrian chuckles softly to himself.

  A rectangular bag under his left arm is promising, though. It looks like a professional camera bag and has a company name stitched into it but the words have been written over repeatedly with permanent marker to match the black of the bag material. Starts with a V but his arm is covering part of it too.

  This guy is pretty strange. Not your average hobo to be sure. But that bag…

  Adrian looks at Sharkie and they make eye contact. Adrian points at Sharkie then the bag before pointing at himself and making a circle with his finger as in “you grab it, I’ll keep watch.”

  Sharkie thinks for a long moment about this then seems to catch on. He creeps over to the Camera Man and crouches by the bag. Adrian looks around, not seeing anyone other than the cars driving down Oak and Fell.

  Sharkie gently lifts Camera Man’s arm and his head moves under the hat.

  Sharkie freezes.

  Camera Man mumbles, “nnnhn… sosorryaudrey… nnhn…”

  The sleeper is still again. Sharkie lifts his arm and sets it on the ground and gingerly picks the bag up.

  Adrian salivates a bit when he sees the satisfying weight of the bag Sharkie is lifting.

  Sharkie rises to his feet and starts walking quickly but quietly away from the former Camera Man. Adrian lets him pass then looks around again and turns to start walking toward the edge of the shade.

  Sharkie looks back toward him and mouths the words, “too easy” but has to close his eyes as a red dot plays across them. Adrian watches the little bright dot dance around on Sharkie’s face, then his upper back and back up to his face. He furrows his brow in confusion.

  Behind them there’s a hacking cough then, “Hey, Sid an’ Fancy!”

  They look back and freeze. Sharkie breathes in sharp and puts his hands up, camera bag dangling from one of them. Adrian just takes it in, unable to move at all.

  Camera Man is awake and pointing a large pistol at them with one hand. He’s propped up on his other hand but still half on the ground. His hat has dropped to the dirt and grass and the whites of his eyes are red, which makes their contrasting blue and brown irises look even more distinct. He looks spun on something.

  “Drop my shit and walk,” he says in a gravelly voice then coughs again. He coughs harder, his eyes close most of the way, and the gun droops a bit.

  Adrian looks sideways at Sharkie, who gets that he’s thinking about running, he’s pretty sure.

  The red blue brown eyes lock on Adrian and he feels the dot dancing on his chest whether he’s imagining it or not.

  Camera Man cocks the hammer on the revolver.

  “Bullets go fast, junkie fuck-stick. That thing in the bag is more trouble than it’s worth.”

  Adrian is trying to try to see if there are bullets in the cylinder. Thinking through the fear now, he remembers the fixed hunting knife he has strapped on the inside of his left shin. Camera Man must notice because he raises the pistol a bit and the laser dot forces Adrian to blink a few times.

  “Oh it’s loaded, bitch. Now… Drop. My. Shit. And. Walk.”

  Sharkie slowly sets the camera bag down and steps back, raising his hands again. Adrian raises his too, deciding that risking a rush assault would end badly either way.

  Camera Man gestures with the gun for them to go and says, “Get the fuck on!”

  They spin and walk quickly back to the sidewalk and book out of sight.

  Felix lowers the Mayor and his hands start shaking. There’s only one live round left in the cylinder. One would do some damage, but maybe not enough.

  That could have gone very badly…

  That’s what the
gravelly voice was for. He put on his most genuine sounding (Solid)Snake Plissken/Adam Jensen/Dirty Harry and did his best not to dip over into Dark Knight Batman voice. That would have been a tad too much. The voice wasn’t too hard considering his relatively recent swan dive off the I-Quit-Tobacco wagon. He’s back up to a pack and a half to two some days from almost none for a long while.

  Felix tucks his revolver back into a black leather holster he stitched into the reinforced lining of the German border coat last night. I took the hammer shrouds off with a screwdriver in a Leatherman I picked up ‘cause the sensation of sliding my thumbs down those has a bad association. Didn’t need ‘em anyway, I figure.

  He takes a Kamel out of its red and tan pack in his BDU pocket and lights it with the vintage Bowers trench lighter that he acquired yesterday after deciding to return to the city. He lets it drop back into his coat on a green drab lanyard.

  He’s been bumming around Concord, Antioch, Bay Point and on around to San Mateo and Burlingame and even Dublin and Pleasanton just recording weird shit on video for weeks. Basically any spot on the BART line he wouldn’t be in normally and also wouldn’t be too uptight about a homeless guy sleeping around outside. His curiosity and hunger for basic knowledge about all this weirdness is continuously fed back like a loop due to him rarely getting any answers to the thousands of questions swirling in his head about it all.

  He charges his camera at coffee shops and keeps up on the news. There’s still nothing about a manhunt under way for the whole… Audrey thing.

  Although, if I could survive a gunshot to the head, I wouldn’t go around advertising it either. I imagine the torches and pitchforks would come out PDQ.

  Yesterday, he made a big run on the military surplus store and a barber in Palo Alto. His hair is trimmed down to a four all around which makes it about even with his facial growth. The barber had to hold his breath a lot but it got done. Even with his liberal use of spray deodorant, Felix is a little ripe from sleeping out.

  His surplus disguise is probably a little silly but he looks nothing like he normally would and that’s the idea, right? If this goes right, he’ll be in and out anyway.

  Felix’s hand is still shaking as he drags on the cigarette and holds the smoke in his lungs before letting it pour out of his mouth. He actively blows the last part out through whistle-pursed lips. He sighs, bringing in more oxygen and letting the slight tingle of his first cigarette of the morning wash over him. Damn that’s so good. I smoke enough again that I rarely truly enjoy them… but the first is always great.

  Morning is relative. He was only asleep for roughly an hour and a half. Still morning by default and the clock, though. Plus, I don’t need to sleep as much right now.

  He hauls himself up, picks up his SF cap, and crosses to the DV-426 in its bag. He picks it up and walks back to his rucksack on the ground and sets the bag down. He puts the cap back on and looks around this currently sleepy end of the Panhandle.

  Time for another pill?

  Certainly.

  That’s why Felix doesn’t sleep as much and probably why he’s been smoking so many cigarettes. He’s taking three to four Wahrheit pills a day now. Usually only “breakfast, lunch, and dinner” but that’s also relative when he sleeps so little and doesn’t eat much. He even got pretty high at first when taking that many but now just has a lot of nervous energy.

  Felix started taking more than just the one pill after watching a young tagger get hit with gas and rounded up in the east bay. Felix had watched from between two dumpsters out of sight as the kid tagged a big, silly squid and a stylized name on a wall down the alley. “SQUIBBLZ” I think?

  The tagger must have been able to “see” somehow because he heard the vents opening before Felix did and stepped aside as the first of the gas blasted out then jumped back when another opened right in front of him. He missed the one behind him, though, and they all combined to surround him with the glowing green gas. He was wearing a breathing mask for spray paint fumes so he didn’t just breath it in and stumble off like the homeless guy on Rudy’s footage, though. He pulled out a little pocket Beretta automatic, chambered the first round, and shot at the vents in front of him. Or where he remembered them being? Hard to say if the gas could get through the filters that quickly. The muzzle flashes from the shots were bright electric blue. The tagger fired until one of the now-dented vents closed with a shriek. Then the other vents closed too.

  Assuming some level of victory, the coughing tagger reloaded his pistol, tucked it, and decided to finish his spray real quick. He didn’t seem concerned about regular law enforcement being called for the shots.

  After less than two minutes, a big white van pulled up at the end of the alley, blocking it off on one side. It looked much like the one parked near Wahrheit’s house the night Felix went back there and had that same weird equipment and antennae on the roof.

  The big side panel door slid open on pneumatics with a hiss and a half dozen weird squares got out and formed up, making a shallow phalanx with thickly padded riot shields. The viewing slits near the top of the shields were mirrored and there were nozzles installed on each side of them between the slits and the far edges of the curved, padded surfaces. The shields had thick tubes running from below the right main support grips on the inner side if the curve to big, shiny cylinders on the small of the suit backs.

  These were not cops.

  They were in blue-black full-body suits that looked sort of like if bizarro cosmonauts had actually had to fight space combat. Their suits were a bit tighter, armored, and more tactical but still had pseudo space helmets on top. The helmets were made of a reflective material like curved black mirror but vaguely translucent, showing eerie silhouettes of the humanoid heads inside. No features visible, but just enough recognizable to be unsettling.

  Felix decided to think of them as “Controllers.”

  The Controller squad was surprisingly quiet so it took the tagger a minute to notice them. They started advancing and the same green gas as the vents began billowing out of the nozzles in the shields on the first row of the phalanx. Upon hearing then seeing them, he dropped his spray cans, pulled out the little Beretta, chambered it, and fired bright blue at the squares as he retreated toward the other end of the alley.

  Rounds stopped dead in the padding on the shields or ricocheted off the mirrored view slits. One shot did succeed in denting a gas nozzle and causing it to sputter some but ultimately his shots did no real damage. They made no attempt to hurt the tagger or return fire with weapons of their own. They just advanced almost silently with their padded gas-gun shields.

  Felix tucked between the dumpsters as much as he could and still be able to see the action.

  The tagger was distracted enough by the first van’s inhabitants that he didn’t see the second van pulling up to block the other end of the alley. It cruised into place and the panel door opened smoothly, revealing a larger humanoid figure in different armor.

  If that same hypothetical Cosmonaut strike team needed a space-bomb disposal guy, this would have been the one. It stepped out of the van and stood almost seven feet tall and the big, thick suit was only part of the reason it was around four feet wide. Felix had dubbed it a “Fat Boy” Controller in his mind. Same black suit material but the helmet was a bit different. Bigger, more rounded faceplate than bomb disposal suits, which assisted the Cosmonaut comparison, but what was inside of the helmet stopped it there.

  Inside the helmet there were several dead, glowing eyes in its vaguely humanoid head and twice as many mechanized diopters which frequently switched back and forth in front of the grotesque eyes on little wire support arms, almost constantly shifting and replacing each other with each twitch of the eyes. Like it had to look through different glasses to see different objects and distances. The diopters were built into the helmet interior and tiny gears constantly whirred back and forth in the housings at the base of the support arms on the left and right.

  Its form shifted insid
e some too almost like they squeezed one of the smaller crazy, eye-covered abominations into the suit or something related to it.

  In its big, gloved paws rested a large nozzle-tipped contraption of metal housing and fitted ampules filled with bright, bubbling green fluid. This strange rig also had a tube running to what must have been a big tank on its back like the other Controllers.

  The Fat Boy took a few heavy steps toward the still-oblivious tagger and stopped then adjusted a valve on the gun thing and pressed a button. There was a fluid hiss now and the tagger finally turned his attention toward the Fat Boy.

  The tagger tried to stop running but it didn’t matter. The Fat Boy pulled a trigger or twisted a valve somewhere on the contraption in its mitts and the brightest, thickest gas Felix has seen blasted out of it. Even with the mask on, the tagger was dosed almost instantly and collapsed toward the ground, only to be stopped by the Fat Boy mid-fall and held up with one big paw.

  Three regular Controllers rushed from the Fat Boy van. Two of them carried a black, padded gurney between them and the third carried a case, which it opened upon reaching the Fat Boy-held tagger. The gurney carriers set it down and gingerly retrieved the unconscious tagger. They placed him on the gurney and the third hooked him up with a kind of IV bag and placed glowing sensors on his neck and chest.

  New patient for Fleischmann Medical Center? Felix had thought to himself before shrinking back further between the dumpsters and attempting to hide until the Controllers left.

  He heard one of the Controllers approaching his spot between the dumpsters and let his eyes go out of focus as he had trained himself to do as a self-defense tactic at that point. Luckily, Grieves was freaked out by Controllers apparently because it was one of the rare times he had disappeared for a while. At least he wouldn’t give Felix away.

  The Controller found Felix between the dumpsters and stood there holding his gas-gun shield cocked down toward him. Felix kept his eyes unfocused and did his best “drunk, scared, oblivious hobo” impression, letting his eyes dart around on the Controller’s shield and imagining the alley walls past him. It wasn’t too hard considering he was actually drinking flasks of Irish pretty much back to back at this point. Refilled it from a fifth in his pack. Usually Michael Collins single malt but sometimes Black Bush when he felt like burying the hatchet. That was before he found out the hard way that multiple Wahrheit pills and drinking too much is quite unpleasant after a certain level of absorption.