Users

by Stacy Buck

  "Rather poetic, don't you think?" she asked.

  "Most poetry is derived from pain."

  There it was. I was showing my other half. Everyone has two sides, and mine were ripping me apart.

  "So where did you go next?" she asked.

  "After I left Fox's place?"

  "Yes."

  "I went to the shelter, like I told her I would," I said.

  "Then what happened?"

  "Then I met a boy."

  #

  Chapter 7

  The cross above the door was illuminated with orange neon lights. Having left Fox behind, Darnell turning on him, and fearing going back to his apartment, Carter was left with only two options, sleep on the streets or go to the shelter. He chose the shelter. The drenched streets of Seattle were no place for any person to sleep, and though he had at his worst times being too strung out to care, he was apt to think otherwise with a clean mind and his distaste for discomfort. The rain and bitter cold could strike at any moment, leaving you soaking wet and freezing.

  He passed beneath the arched doorway and into a world of the unfortunate and the misunderstood. Rows of cots were laid out in an old run down gymnasium. The markings on the floor, the outlines of a basketball court, had long faded away. The nets on the two hoops hung in tatters, having seen far too many games.

  The pastor approached, wearing jeans and a button up t-shirt, but the black collar with the white center gave him away.

  "Looking for a place to stay tonight?" he asked politely.

  There was not even a hint of judgment in his tone; he had seen it all before.

  "My place...it is under construction," Carter said.

  "No matter. All are welcome here, regardless of the reason." The pastor spread his arms wide, inviting him in.

  "Thank you father." Carter's eyes darted about the room, looking from cot to cot.

  "Pick any open spot," he said noticing Carter's gaze.

  "Thank you," Carter said again.

  He walked between a row that was mostly empty, wanting as much privacy as could be afforded in a place like this. He picked his cot the same way a lone person picked a movie theater seat or a urinal, leaving at least one empty space between him and the other patrons. With no belongings, it was easy for him to settle in. Others removed their backpacks and shoved them beneath their cots. Men, women, and children of all ages prepared themselves for a night of sheltered and undisturbed sleep, that some appeared to be in sore need of. Most of the people were average looking in appearance, the kind that were really just concerned with keeping themselves and their children, if they had any, safe; more worried about where their next night's sleep may be or where their next meal would come from. Then there were the others, appearing dirty and disheveled. The true street walkers of Seattle's underbelly. They were the few with sense enough to make getting their junkie ass out of the elements for the night a priority. There were a number of faces he recognized, but did not know personally, from his days spent trolling the less desirable streets and alleyways in search of his next fix.

  Carter was just about to lay back and stare at the ceiling for a while when a young man, barely more than a boy, flopped down into the cot next to him. Carter scanned the room, finding many available cots were still open that were not located directly to his side.

  "I haven't seen you around these parts before," the man, who appeared to still be in his teens, said.

  The young man was probably too young to have been on the streets during Carter's using days, leaving no reason for them to recognize one another.

  "I haven't been here in quite a while," Carter admitted.

  "Fall off the wagon, huh?"

  The young man had dirty blond hair, a sparse amount of facial fuzz, and a slender build, reminding Carter of a much younger version of himself in some ways.

  "No, nothing like that...well almost, but it didn't pan out like I had planned, and I never went through with it anyway," he said. Why he was babbling on like a gossiping school girl, Carter wasn't quite sure. "It's a long story."

  "No problem man, I'm Jason," the young man said.

  "Carter," he replied.

  "So how long of a story are we talking here? We're not going anywhere and it's still two hours until lights outs." Jason sat on his cot, leaning in with his elbows on his thighs.

  Carter took a deep breath, then started in with the hellish experience of the past few days, leaving out the details about his powers. They talked for hours, going back and forth with horror stories of being addicted to drugs.

  "Its been five years since the last time I used."

  "Wow...that's great. Really it is," Jason said wringing a hand around the back of his neck.

  "What's wrong?" Carter asked.

  "It's just...I don't think I'll ever got off this junk." Jason lifted the sleeve on his shirt, revealing pock marks all up and down his forearm and the inside of his elbow. Jason's arms were badly scarred and a number of his veins were blackened and dead. The young man had been shooting up a lot. Carter's mouth went dry. Just seeing the signs of using drugs gave him a dopamine rush. It also raised a big red flag. His city was rotting from the inside out, like an incurable cancer, but this cancer did have a cure. It was more of a virus, and he had to be the antibiotic. Maybe he really did need to take out the cartel. How much longer could he keep hiding anyway? There was only one way to get the cartel off his back and that was to cut off their head.

  Carter pulled the folded up piece of paper from his pocket and stared at the address Fox had given him.

  "What's that?" Jason asked.

  "Nothing. Just another in a long line of mistakes." Carter had made his fair share of them, but maybe just this once his mistake was a good one.

  "Well the line can't be that long. You got clean. That's something," Jason said.

  "Yes, yes it is," he said. "You can too, you know that right?"

  "No, I don't think so. I'm in too deep. I don't know anything else." Slowly, Jason lowered his sleeve to cover the marks on his arm.

  "We've all got our scars," Carter said, and he removed his shirt, turned to his cot, revealed a back covered in long scars, and pulled the blanket from his cot up tight to his neck as the lights went out. Jason gasped when he saw the whip marks on Carter's back, but it didn't bother Carter. He had buried that skeleton deep in his closet long ago. The same skeleton he had tried to drown in booze and drugs for all those years.

  *****

  He awoke the next morning to find Jason's cot empty. The young man turned junkie had probably fled the scene early that morning while Carter was fast asleep. He slipped his shirt and shoes back on and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Most of the other vagrants had already abandoned their cots in search of spare change to purchase a bottle of booze or a bag of dope, but Carter had other things on his mind. His experience with Jason the night before left him with a weight on his shoulders. The weight of an entire city bearing down on him.

  What started out as an evasion to get out of spending the night in jail, had turned into an assassination attempt on his life, which in turn had led him to face the ugliness that was the city's unfortunate drug addled youth. How many times had he contemplated ending his miserable life during those dark days of using drugs. If he was going to end it, he might as well do it doing something good for once. He laced up his shoes, tied them tight, and pulled the folded up piece of paper from his pocket as he headed for the door.

  Forty minutes later he was standing in a downpour. Water dripped from the rain soaked brim of his hat and ran down his face as he stared up at the towering multi-storied building. All around him the people of the city went about their business, business men in their fancy suits and brief cases passed him by without a second glance. A messenger wearing skin tight pants and riding a mountain bike blew by Carter on his way to a delivery. Cars moved at a crawl on the busy street behind him. But this was no ordinary day for him.

  The front of the building was made of solid glass. Carter p
ulled open the front door and approached a desk immediately to the right upon entering. A young man, barely older than Jason, in a fancy suit with a blue and red stripped tie, greeted him from behind the front desk.

  "How can I help you sir?" the young man asked. His name tag said "Bobby," in black letters against a gold background.

  "Yeah, I'm here to see the Vampire," Carter said, and poor Bobby's eyes went wide. The young man fumbled with something under the desk, and for a split second Carter wondered if the unassuming youth was reaching for a gun, but a moment later men in black and white suits entered the lobby through a side door next to the elevator, Carter hadn't even noticed. There was four of them, all wearing matching suits, and with similar well fit builds. Their faces were even similar, they had square jaw lines, dark sunglasses covering their eyes, and hair that was buzzed short along the sides and cut just slightly longer on the top.

  "We're going to have to ask you to leave sir," Bobby said as the four men approached.

  "Why? Is he not in?"

  "He said it was time for you to leave." One of the finely dressed bodyguards gave Carter a little nudge from behind. Carter turned on him, going nose to nose with the man.

  "You tell your boss I'm coming for him," Carter growled through gritted teeth at the guard.

  "I'll be sure to do that," the guard said, but Carter was already heading for the glass door. Having gotten what he needed, he hi-tailed it out of there. Carter had confirmed that Alaric's intel was correct and indeed the Vampire was located within the building, but most importantly he had discovered the location of the elevator and his way into the building. A crooked smirk crossed his lips. One way or another, this was all going to be over soon.

  *****

  He waited until the early morning hours, just after four A.M., to put his plan into effect. He squeezed his fingers into the holes on the sewer cover and heaved the heavy lid off from its place. There was a ladder leading down into the sewer, and he climbed down into the hole, pulling the cover back in place behind him. At the bottom of the ladder, he splashed down in ankle deep water. The air was dank and smelled of shit. Something scurried past his foot and he thanked his lucky stars it was too dark for him to see what it was.

  He felt his way along the damp slimy wall until he reached an intersection that spider webbed into eight different directions.

  "Damn." He didn't bring a flashlight, but then again he didn't need one. He lifted his pointer finger in the air before his face and let the fires within him ignite a solitary flame from the tip of his finger. It offered just enough light, like a flickering candle, to see the pipes running overhead and the creepy crawlies hiding in their shadows. There were pipes zigzagging in and out of the tunnels, but one pipe was much larger than the rest, and being that the Vampire had taken up residence in the largest building in the area, he figured he'd follow that to its source.

  The shaft following the pipe was wide enough for Carter's shoulders, but he had to duck down as the ceiling crept in on him from above. He exited the shaft and entered into a wide square chamber. The single large pipe branched out into multiple smaller pipes, feeding the building like roots to a tree made of concrete and steel. This had to be it. Carter let the single flame on his finger turn into a fire around his hand. He grunted past the pain that shot into his other hand as a second fire ignited. Using both hands, he placed them against the concrete and pressed.

  The fires rose up his arms as more of his body was required to heat the stone. Carter forced the heat forward into a tunnel of spiraling flame, and the concrete was blackened with soot. His heart pumped faster and faster as more heat was needed to reach the point where the concrete would lose its cohesion. He growled like a rabid dog as the inferno rose in a single column up and into the concrete. Slowly, the stone began to chip, flake, and fall away in small chunks at first, then larger and larger pieces came loose. He had to turn his face away to keep from getting a sizzling hot mouthful of stone and an eyeful of gritty dust. The concrete fell all around him, leaving a gaping hole.

  Carter burst through the floor right into the elevator shaft just as plann-

  "What the hell are you doing!" Bobby shouted as Carter burst through the lobby floor a good twenty feet from the elevator shaft.

  "Oh, shit." Carter's gaze darted from the elevator, to Bobby, to the elevator, and back to Bobby, who was frantically pressing the button beneath the desk.

  "Well fuck it." Carter flopped out onto the floor. He flailed and rolled about, trying to get to his feet, and before he stood up, the guards busted into the room with guns drawn.

  "Get on your knees!" The same guard from earlier yelled.

  "Okay, just don't shoot," Carter said holding his hands out defensively and slowly dropping to his knees, but before they hit the floor, Carter fired first. Fire shot from his palms like a pair of flamethrowers, engulfing all four men in flames. Their screams were a chorus of pure terror. The glass door at the front of the building slammed shut as Bobby ran for his life. He had probably never seen a scorcher before in the flesh, and obviously Bobby wanted nothing to do with one.

  Carter marched to the elevator door, feeling a bit bad about burning the four men alive, but if they worked for the Vampire, they were probably no good anyway. He pressed the arrow pointing up and the doors opened immediately. As he stepped inside, Carter pulled the piece of paper Fox had given him from his pocket and checked the address again as if he hadn't memorized it a dozen times by now.

  He hit the button that would take him to the top floor, all the way to the penthouse. The buttons for each floor lit up one by one as he passed them by. The elevator was silent. There was no cheesy music that was so commonly played in elevators around town to accompany his ride. The square box seemed to squeeze in on him in the suddenly claustrophobic elevator. His nerves were playing tricks on him, and he hadn't taken his medication today. But he was fine with that. The last thing he wanted was any drugs in his system deadening his senses. He was going to need the pain, the fuel, every bit of it to defeat whatever lay beyond the elevator's door.

  After what seemed like forever, the light hit the fortieth floor and the chime dinged as the door to the elevator opened. Carter went flat against the wall and peaked out the opening, expecting to find a heavily guarded hallway, but it was completely empty. There was nothing more than a dark hallway that ran straight to a single door. He crept out onto the plush carpet and tiptoed his way across the hall. Careful to not make a sound, Carter grabbed the door's handle, expecting it to be locked, but again he was surprised; the door was unlocked. He turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  He froze where he stood, and blinked, unable to believe his eyes.

  Leaning back in a puffy chair was Fox with her hands behind her head and her feet up on the table in front of her.

  "Come in," she said beckoning him to come forward.

  But Carter couldn't get his legs to so much as budge.

  #

  Chapter 8

  Many moments passed before Carter, having gone completely numb, was able to take his first steps into the spacious penthouse.

  "What...what are you doing here?" Carter asked stumbling over his words.

  "Waiting for you," Fox said.

  Carter could have blown over by a desk fan at that moment. He wasn't sure what was going on. He had just torched four men alive to get into the building and at the Vampire. Instead he found Fox, sitting casually behind a table.

  "Waiting for me, but why?" he asked thoroughly confused. "Where's the Vampire? This is supposed to be his penthouse."

  The room was dimly lit, but he could still make out the look on her face, that look that told him she was, as always, the smartest person in the room.

  "Oh, Carter," she said getting to her feet.

  She wasn't wearing her typical skin tight black jumpsuit with all the toys attached to her belt and wrists. No, she was wearing a silky low cut V-neck shirt with a long skirt that had a high cut slip up one leg, exposing he
r shapely calf and thigh as she stepped out from behind the table.

  "You always were the simple one. You always looked for the simple pleasures," she said and as she passed in front of him, lightly cupping his crotch for the most brief of moments as she brushed her hand across his jeans.

  Carter had to force himself to keep from snatching her wrist, snapping her around, and embracing her in a passionate kiss. He wanted her bad, and she knew it.

  "So you're behind the drugs?" he asked.

  Carter hated confrontation and it took all the gusto he could muster to come right out and say it.

  "Well you were able to put that much together." She clapped in a mock congratulations as she spoke.

  "But why?"

  "Money," she answered plainly. "What other reason is there?" she asked, but Carter was shaking his head in denial.

  "No. No, I know you better than this."

  "You know nothing about me!" she shouted.

  Fox turned on him and got right in his face, but he held his ground.

  "You know nothing about what it's like to watch someone with powers like yours just squander them. No, I needed the money for all my little trinkets and toys to keep up with the users like you."

  "I don't believe it," he said.

  "Believe it, because that's the reality." She propped both hands against the table and lifted herself up to a sitting position.

  Fox looked at him seductively and using one finger beckoned him to come closer.

  "You know I still have feelings for you."

  He fought the urge to go to her. His heart soared at the thought of being with her again, but his head ached, something was wrong with this picture. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his anxiety level spiked, his adrenaline pumped, and his blood flowed hot like magma. Carter almost took off right then, his fight or flight mechanism telling him he needed to run.

  "Think about it...all the drugs and money you could ever want. Just join me, and it's all yours," she cooed.