Dead Man Walking

by Zach Adams

  Isaac peaked through, and the gray shape was nowhere to be seen. There was Chloe in a circular elastic net chair, sobbing as she held her tiny black kitten, Nikola. The cat rested at an awkward angle as though he had tried to escape the girl’s grip, only to give up and nuzzle his tiny head into his companion’s damp chin.

  She hasn’t cried that hard since she was twelve, A shaky, anxious voice in Isaac’s head pointed out. Panic wasn’t wrong.

  “Chlo?” He asked as he pulled the door open. “What’s wrong? Is it Uncle Vic? Tobias?”

  Chloe jerked her head up to face him, the unexpected sound of Isaac’s voice giving her phantom chills. He saw that her eyes were swollen and red, with streams of tears covering her face. Strands of dark hair, a shade lighter than her brothers and visibly cleaner where it hadn’t been cried on, got caught in the flood and stuck to the girl’s face. A few drops were starting to freeze in the late December air.

  Chloe caught her brother’s eye first with immense shock, which faded within a heartbeat to utter confusion and mild embarrassment.

  “I… Don’t know.” She told her brother. He suspected she was lying, but she genuinely had no clue. The second she lifted her head her mind shook loose whatever could cause her to weep so uncontrollably.

  Isaac helped her to her feet. Dark patches where tears had landed covered the various Iron Men on her t-shirt and fuzzy pajamas. She wiped her face, swept her hair back from her face and followed her brother back inside. Nikola, who jumped ship as soon as Chloe let him go, was attempting to play with a completely uninterested Gamora on the sofa. The program on TV was just reaching the end credits.

  “What the hell,” Isaac said, annoyed. “The episode was just starting a few seconds ago.” He checked the Xbox often used as a DVD player, to find it was unplugged and thus not a candidate for displaying a Doctor Who DVD; the program had indeed been coming from the television set. He shrugged in frustration and trudged off to prepare to face the day. Before he made it out of the room, he turned back and showed Chloe his phone.

  “Hey, my phone turned up broken this morning. Any chance you could take a look at it?” Isaac asked her.

  Without a word she took the device from him, moved a pair of thick plastic-framed glasses from her pocket to her face, and examined the device at all angles from about an inch away. She put it through the same tests Isaac had tried before - button press, slightly harder button press, rapid double and triple button press, hold home and lock button simultaneously - with no results. The phone defiantly displayed its screen of white static.

  “Yeah, I’ll see what I can do with it. If I can’t, maybe Sarah or Professor Oshiro can help later.” Chloe said as she placed the phone on a small plastic stand on the coffee table, then proceeded to gather a magnifying glass, a pair of tweezers and a doll-sized screwdriver from her bookshelf.

  Regardless of what Isaac thought of the mess, she knew exactly where everything was on it, and quite frankly he sounded like mom critiquing dad’s workspace in the old garage. He tended to counter that statement with a reminder that she did the same to him any time he left a mess anywhere, and they had been at a stalemate over the topic ever since, so long as Chloe didn’t peek into her brother’s bedroom.

  This was the version of Chloe that Isaac was used to, focused, and driven. She had moved in to save money while staying at the top of her computer engineering class at the local university. Although, as Isaac loved to point out whenever she bragged about her grades, she and her friend Sarah, who studied medicine but still shared a few classes with Chloe, had a habit of swapping first and second place every month or two since they met in middle school.

  “Not that it matters,” Chloe would claim each time. “It’s not a competition.” Often, she would say this as she departed to put in extra study time in order to take the lead back.

  Chloe no longer seemed to notice that her brother or the cats were still in the room. Those glasses meant she was in “work mode” and could not be distracted, regardless of how hard one might try. Isaac had always suspected she was a machine herself. When he put on his glasses, it just meant he couldn’t see.

  The following portion of Isaac Falcone’s daily routine is quite probably only interesting to the one participating. In order to offer an in-depth view into his life before it becomes overtaken by chaotic weirdness, while still maintaining a semblance of interest and decent pacing, it will be summarized here.

  Isaac replaced his baggy plaid pajama bottoms with slacks and faded Ravenclaw tee shirt with a purple sweater over a white button-down shirt, rolled the sleeves to his elbows and added a thin silver necktie. He brushed his teeth - five brush strokes on each side, bottom left to right then top right to left - to the rhythm of Talking Heads’ “Once in A Lifetime”, then popped open an orange medicine canister full of little blue ovals and threw one down his throat.

  Isaac looked straight past the pale grey shape standing two inches to his left, fished a wristwatch featuring the face of Scooby Doo from the chaos of his room and noticed the time; 10:00AM.

  “Fuck, I’m late!” Isaac exclaimed as he threw his black and gray backpack over his shoulder and bolted out of the apartment building, down three winding sets of stairs to the parking lot.

  Directly across the lot, narrowly avoiding a chance encounter between the icy ground and Isaac’s backside, he reached his battered, old, candy red PT Cruiser with an obnoxious blotch of yellow paint on the rear bumper, from one of several times he broke dad’s ‘Don’t Run in the Garage’ rule as a boy.

  After rubbing his hands together for warmth and starting the vehicle - which took three tries, almost always - Isaac attempted to connect his iPod to the stereo. It died with a pathetic, robotic whine. When the noise ended, the clock read out in lifeless, green numbers, “00:00 AM/PM”.

  Feeling the frustrations of the past two hours slide over him like a large bucket of molten lead, Isaac clenched his jaw and hurried off to work.

  Same as it ever was, he thought.

  Chapter Two: A Little Bird

  ?2018?

  Even the bright, too-early morning sun couldn’t get any significant warmth through the air. The car, holding in the chill from sitting unoccupied through the night, was even colder than the city outside. It proved a challenge keeping the machine steady as Isaac’s entire body trembled. As he drove, his fingers stiffening and getting stuck to the steering wheel, he could see his stuttering breath in front of him, fogging up his vision for a second or two at a time.

  Long enough to slam into the F-150 in front of me, spin out of control, and get crushed under the ensuing forty-two car pileup, Panic babbled in the recesses of Isaac’s brain.

  Through the forearm-width space he had scraped clean on the frosty windshield, Isaac could see a thick slab of fresh snow coating the city, glittering so obnoxiously in the sunlight that he may as well have taken his chances with the frost.

  The streets hadn’t been fully swept yet and for some reason, presumably long-term residents of Alaska took the opportunity to forget how to drive. Isaac passed three grisly crashes on his route, all of which provoked a spike in his blood pressure.

  Anchorage was in the midst of the coldest winter on record. Temperatures routinely fell deep into the negatives, made harsher by forty-two mile-per-hour wind slapping unfortunate locals in the face, dusting them in fresh powder if they failed to find shelter.

  “Look at the snow in the sunlight!” People often said to Isaac since he first learned the art of complaining around kindergarten. “It’s so pretty and soft and relaxing!”

  His teachers, his mother, his friends’ mothers, Uncle Vic, there was someone ready to recite the same speech to him every winter. It was as if a requirement for adulthood was memorizing a speech glorifying the beauty and majesty of winter in Alaska. Summers here he rather enjoyed, but not the damn winters.

  Isaac never learned the speech. His nose hairs were frozen, his cheeks stung, and he couldn’t feel his fingers. His feet were
soaked to the bone from stomping into a sheet of snow which hid a deep puddle of foul brown slush, making the task of guiding his miserable old car through the frozen concrete maze tougher still.

  I wanna go home, Isaac whined in his head.

  The parking lot of the library was nearly empty. A tan Porsche sat crooked in a handicapped parking spot close to the entrance, the only vehicle Isaac recognized at first glance. Three other random vehicles, likely belonging to his fellow employees, were scattered around the lot.

  Isaac pulled into the nearest available parking spot to the front door which didn’t require a pass - in his mind driving like Ace Ventura, but in reality, operating his vehicle more like his half-blind uncle. He made it into the spot, ensuring the wheels were equal distances from the yellow lines as he did every morning, grabbed his backpack and asked Scooby Doo for the time; 9:30 AM.

  Isaac blinked and shook his head, triple and quadruple-checking the numbers. Sure enough, he arrived at work thirty minutes before he had left his apartment. He convinced himself it wasn’t important, and half-jogged into the maze-like building to escape the cold.

  “Well, if it isn’t the late Isaac Falcone!” Cheered one of the few other employees in the library. One of the three reasons Isaac had remained at this job as long as he had poked his head through the door, grinning like a fool.

  Donny Grigoryan was as close to a best friend as Isaac ever had. He was a manic ball of electricity, with a face-splitting grin permanently attached to him. The pair had been inseparable since late elementary school, though it began primarily as a result of both Donny’s persistence and the obligation Isaac felt to control the damage his friend was capable of causing.

  Today Donny had chosen to slip on a bottle-green blazer over a tee shirt displaying the faded, chipped face of the Joker a la Heath Ledger. His relatively stubby legs were mercifully covered by more conventional black slacks - neither the garment itself nor the covering of his appendages was always guaranteed. That he hadn’t yet been fired was due to the head librarian’s seemingly endless patience, and Isaac putting a stop to his more chaotic antics before someone else could see.

  A pale grey shadow stood to Donny’s left, waving the opposite hand from him but otherwise copying his motions. Isaac rubbed his eyes and the mimic vanished.

  Damn sparkly snow playing tricks on my eyes, I guess, Isaac thought. Better get them checked again. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt. Indeed, he had not seen an eye doctor since his mother had originally taken him in.

  Donny led Isaac on a long, convoluted route to the checkout desk where he should already have been. At every turn he would stop short and peer in all directions, sniffing for something in the air. Isaac played along, amused by Donny’s cartoonish behavior.

  When they arrived, certain they weren’t followed by anyone, Donny slid across the nearest counter toward Isaac’s seat, sending loose papers and books flying as he did. The victim of Donny’s attention tensed every muscle from scalp to toe as he watched it happen. Just before the living force of entropy could sit on it, Isaac repositioned a small, folding twin picture frame to behind his computer.

  This is how accomplices to murder feel, Isaac thought to himself. In fact, this train of thought more or less defined his years of friendship with Donny.

  “I have this recurring dream that one day you’ll enter a room without destroying it,” Isaac said in a sternly matriarchal tone. Donny snickered it off, absently replacing a few nearby documents without much care.

  “You’ve been saying that since we were eleven, frienderino,” He replied, turning his eyes from the desk to Isaac as he did. “Nothing, be it man, beast, or pharmaceutical, can tame the great Genghis Don.” Donny flexed his arms in an attempt at a Herculean display, though his biceps being maybe half an inch thicker than Isaac’s didn’t present a particularly impressive show.

  “It still provides me with something to hope for in this life,” Isaac replied dryly.

  Returning his friend’s proud gesture with a tight-lipped smile and a pair of light pats to his head, Isaac pushed through the waist-high swinging door to the checkout desk and head office, dropping his bag underneath the counter before grabbing a nametag and a set of keys from their respective pegs on the rear wall.

  “Did Beige notice I was late?” Isaac asked. The assistant librarian Ben Schafer, unwilling recipient of the nickname Beige, loved to lord his position over employee’s heads while his boss wasn’t looking. He had a particular distaste for the energetic Donny and his accomplice, Isaac, who always seemed to skate by unscathed after his attempts at professional discipline.

  “I think he’s busy chopping up younglings, bro, you’re safe. I’m gonna take a nap in the supply closet, wake me if he comes that way, will you?” Donny wiggled the fingers of his right hand in Isaac’s general direction and trotted off to his destination. His friend rolled his eyes and took his seat behind the checkout counter, scooting the old gray swivel chair across the carpet so his arms could rest on the surface.

  Isaac booted up the ancient Macintosh cube waiting for him on the counter. While it energized, he glanced at the relocated pair of photographs, returning them to their original spot to his left. One held an image of miniature Isaac and Chloe, held up by Melisa and Martin Falcone, respectively. All four were smiling broadly against the professionally provided, blank backdrop.

  The other showed the siblings several years older, on a faded and frayed old blue sofa. On Isaac’s left was a taller, sandy-haired relation - their cousin Tobias - while their white-bearded Uncle Vic sat to Chloe’s right wearing suspenders over a white short-sleeved button-down, tucked into tan slacks. Everyone but Isaac was smiling.

  The Macintosh reached the login screen with the bitten-apple logo. Isaac typed in his employee information, navigating the keyboard with expert speed, and began day seven-hundred fifty-five in the library.

  As it was the day after Christmas, the library saw little business. Isaac mostly passed time playing Minesweeper while keeping his eyes peeled for Beige. Whenever he thought danger was approaching, he would leap from his seat and do his best to appear busy by pretending to sort books or print documents.

  Halfway through the workday, Tobias visited the library. He was a mop-headed, beak-nosed giraffe of a man who resembled a young teacher on his first day in a wrinkly button down, suspenders, slacks, circular wire-framed glasses, and a slightly crooked bowtie. His sticklike arms threatened to snap under the stack of books they held; an atlas, volumes E and L of the World Book, and a bulky pair of tomes on meteorology and ornithology.

  “Looks like you’ve got the rest of your week booked solid, Tobias.” Isaac said. His cousin blinked from behind the stack and then grinned as he placed it on the desk.

  “Just a few things for work,” Tobias replied.

  “You got a job already?” Isaac asked. He dutifully stamped the books where appropriate as they spoke.

  “Some freelance research type stuff, got into it while I was in Seattle and it sort of followed me home,” Tobias answered quickly.

  Tobias had moved to Seattle in the summer of 2011 for school, shortly after Isaac and Chloe were taken in by his father Victor. A few years later Victor relocated to Seattle himself, just as Isaac and Chloe were getting into their own place. A week before Christmas 2018, Chloe answered a call from Tobias announcing that he had secured an apartment in the Spenard area and would be returning to Alaska on Christmas Eve. Victor, now well into his 70’s, was living with other relatives in the area. No other explanation for his sudden return to the north was offered.

  Tobias shuffled back a few inches after picking up his books. There was a tense smile on his face as he mentioned Seattle. Isaac raised an eyebrow at his cousin. Then he recalled something else he felt he ought to ask.

  “Hey, have you heard from Chloe?” Isaac asked before Tobias could leave. The latter looked up as if to read his own thought bubble for a moment before shaking his head.

  “She
was acting weird this morning,” Isaac continued before Tobias could ask why. “I found her crying like something horrible had happened, but when I asked why she said she had no clue. I thought maybe something had happened with you or Uncle Vic.”

  Tobias frowned in concern, and Isaac felt like there was something he didn’t know.

  “I’ll give her a call,” Tobias said. He took a post-it note from Isaac’s stack and wrote something on it.

  “Dad’s doing well, all things considered. Same goes for me,” Tobias continued. “I have to get going, though. This is my new address. Take care of yourself, Isaac.” He turned and left in a hurry.

  Isaac slouched in his swivel chair. He tilted it back just enough to avoid falling on his back and placed himself at such an angle that he could see five of the ten clocks in the library, including the digital readout on the Macintosh screen, and the awkwardly twisted forelegs of Scooby Doo. To the left and right (#2 and #4, according to Isaac’s mental list) were digital timepieces resting proudly above Fiction and Nonfiction. The pair of clocks and those like them were automatically set by a computer, much to Isaac’s appreciation.

  Almost directly across the room from Isaac was an analog device which had never been seen running less than fifteen minutes ahead of its computer-programmed counterparts; #9. Most employees had learned to accept the misfit clock and ignore it, but Isaac devoted ten minutes of every workday to adjusting it. Today was no exception.

  Isaac grabbed a three-feet-high step ladder from a storage area on the far side of the building, using up the first ninety-two seconds of the task. A sheet of plain printer paper was taped to the top step, bearing a message in Donny’s unmistakable scribble; “I never knew my real ladder!”