I climbed the rock wall and walked along it until I came to the wood's edge. To the fringes of another small town, this one a smoky skied from coal mining, with a new town square of freshly placed stones and clean storefronts. I was drooling at the sight of a breakfast cart, then my eye’s met the bank. Three floors, pristine, standing gloriously in the sunlight. I thought it was an oasis made just for me, to feed my appetite for the job, and fill my water filled stomach with feasts. I had absolutely nothing but the piece I was given, and the only thing I know how to do was sitting like a duck in front of me. I was desperate and naive, thinking it was my luck, good fortune to find, either way it was my fate.”
“What did you do?” she asks.
“I went for it, and it went well. They were more horrified at my scruffy appearance then the piece I was pointing at them. The clerk, a busy woman who seemed not to be scared but just wanting to be done with it, quickly handed over the money. On the way out from the easiest score of my life I heard shouting. They were shouting my name, they knew I was there. My first job alone, I panicked and held the whole place hostage. After two hours they demanded I release the young and old. I didn’t want any hostages, to do that to anyone, they were all innocent to me, but that's what I was dealt. I was desperate and a life of hard labor, cutting stones was not gonna to cut it as my luck.
I was letting them all go, but as they were filing through the front door the pencil pushers yelled my name again. Then opened fire on a guy they thought was me, it wasn't, but they can't shoot straight. Missing the guy entirely, instead killing a seven year old child, who died in the doorway on the edge of safety, safety from me. I took cover behind the clerk’s desk and shot back, before feeling absolutely sick with guilt. Nauseating to my starving stomach looking at myself in the tattered clothes, feeling the dirt masking my skin, my face, the mud in my hair and under my fingernails. The blood on the carpet was not my own. Asking myself, what about my own life is worth more than that kid’s? that question plays through my head at least once a day for as long as I’ve been alive. I knew I couldn't live with it, that guilt, of knowing that a child's life is collateral damage to my own. To surrender, I would be locked in a cell alone with nothing else to think about, so I resigned to take my own life.”
“You don't have a hole in your head.”
“No lead left,” he says, “I took a letter opener from the desk and opened my arms and thighs. It stung, but my heart was pumping with adrenaline and panic. I was weeping and stumbling as they were again wildly firing. I passed out a minute later and bled out in the bank vault, alone, and lifeless...for awhile anyway.”
“For a while?” she whispers her question.
“I heard a man’s muffled voice speaking to me, calling my name. It sounded like I was under water and he was speaking from above its surface.”
“Then what?”
“I woke up under the water of a giant fountain, in the center of a city square. Of a place with things I couldn't've imagined before that day. Taking my first breath of an Alto that wasn't my own. Muddying the water with the dirt of the wilderness washing from my skin and clothes. Empty pockets but for an empty handgun. A man’s hand stretched out to me. He was there, Alister, a Death, as you likely think of him. His archaic mouth of blue teeth smiling, with the gravitas of eternity personified, and welcoming me back to the living as the greatest vault knocker the Altonevers has ever seen. Living through an infinite number of days, and places, and perceptions, but always on the run from one place to the next, always alive in my dream. It’s been so long a time since then.”
“So it kinda worked out right?” she says through confused discomfort.
“I am what I am. There’re casualties sometimes though none intentionally. I’m not as bloodthirsty as the others. Sensitive, he teasingly calls me, only him though. He collects the life of each being slain by a Raven’s hand. And with each one of mine, the wounds of that day resurface, the stinging agony of the scar tissue stripes on my arms opening again, and again. The heartache of that day, the surges sorrow through the whole of my being, like it’s the very blood pumping through my veins,” he says rolling up his sleeves to show her the rose colored scars of slashes up his forearms.
“Did you get tattoos?”
“Oh right, yeah it’s like the cut here dots on plastic and stuff.”
She says nothing, just letting time pass as pieces of percussive rhythm rise to her from the random splashing of rain. She watches the Jollies roll by, lifting and dropping millions of momentarily glimmering grains of water at a time.
“Do you ever think of their lives, the one's you've taken? of what they're losing, of waking up, eating, laughing, crying, of dreaming, of a chance to live?” she asks.
“Anna, I know exactly what they're losing, because it's what I've taken from myself, and every time I’m reminded of the price of my persistence.”
“But, does that mean you understand what their lives meant to them, of how they feel, or their loved one’s feel?” she asks.
“There are billions of stars in one sky, there are infinite skies Anna. Trillions times trillions times trillions isn’t enough to explain how many skies there are. Endless variations of that person under just one of those skies, if one of them ceases to exist there are an infinite number that don’t, that continue living.”
“And an infinite number that do not,” she says.
“If it happens that one were to end because of my actions, is it me? or am I simply an instrument of possibility, all possibilities must play out.”
“That sounds sparing to the conscience,” she says.
“I can only be what I am.”
“Do you have one?” she asks.
“Who knows, it's all just the pursuit of pleasures.”
“What a terrible thing, to have done. To have to have done, and have that with you wherever you go,” she says, “I understand why you did what you did, and to be in that position, you did the best you could do, but to actually have to done it, is…”
He doesn't reply, only nurses his smoke avoiding her eyes.
“A soul, to live free in all of infinity, as a slave to death,” she says.
“The good fortune of a tragic fate,” he says.
“We should be on our way to the station,” she says with a smile, seeming honest to him and softening his tense spine, he clears throat of welling sobs. Seeing she's not running from him like the monster he thinks of himself, but is already looking back, waving and waiting for him to follow, to lead her home as he promised.
“Walk a girl home?” Anna asks bashfully.
“Sure thing,” He says. She walks ten paces onto the rooftop before throwing a look meant to be alluring over her shoulder for him to see, then yelps “AH!” And squirms. Realizing it’s still raining she laughs her way back under the cover of the water tower, a laugh that follows her to rub off on him. She spends the night hardly able to catch a wink of sleep, instead watching the rain being swept by the wind, and lifted and dropped by the million when jollies roll past. She drifts away with her eyes closed tight, not awake and not yet asleep. Hearing the pitter patter of the rain as patterns rising and falling from randomness into minutes long rhapsodic ear pleasing rhythms of her minds design.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rotten Apple
“Would you kill a fly?” he asks her at first light.
“I wouldn’t want to, but if it was really annoying, I guess” she says.
“So you would?” he cracks a smile.
“People aren’t fly's.”
“No they’re not, but what if that fly was Larry or Larry to someone?”
“I get your point, but that's dumb, because that doesn’t change that it's a fly to me, or you.”
“My point is, do you only value lives you understand to be living, or do you value anything that is alive?”
“What's the difference?”
“Only your naive perception of existence. It's just something to wonder?”
/> “Oh, and your all knowing?”
“The coast isn't clear, so we have to be careful. The odds creep up on the careless, and it only takes one slip to do us in. Plus the pesky pencil pushers have all of time to wait,” he says tiredly.
“And he, is a friend of yours,” she asks.
“A good one, and a good one to have,” he says laying back on the cross beam of the water tower and she curls against the corner of its leg like a cat. Resting their eye’s for an only hour when the town's window's start lighting up, speckling the view with yellowed rectangles, though looking like big fireflies in a smoke filled room.
“It's almost sun up Carrots,” he says, nudging her awake by her shoulder.
“Time to get going?” she yawns and stretches. Opening her eyes and seeing him as a scared kid barefoot foraging through a forest forever looking for a vault that'll satisfy his unquenchable thirst. As a pauper perpetually in pursuit of an unattainable feeling. A feeling that persists only in his memory.
“Always,” he says.
“I need to shower, and to eat,” she says as they saunter out of the alleyway. Sleepless and disheveled in damp clothes from the night before. Again weaving with their heads down through the morning crowd’s of the crisp and awake, clean shaven people flooding toward to their nearest InterAlto rails. Still unsure if she's running to safety or from it, she runs behind, beside him. He snatches a pink plaid scarf from a passing woman, and gives it to her, it sits loosely around her neck.
“Thank you,” she says, thinking he meant well.
“Certainly. Stop for something to eat?” He asks.
“I could go for a cup of coffee,” she adds. The two are now next to each other, together, with familiarity of the other’s walk. They stop in a dusty deli and Anna orders first, then steps aside waiting for her coffee.
“And you sir?” asks a balding stocky man from behind the counter. Of average height and an ambivalent expression you’d expect of a man who's been a clerk for ages to have.
“The register,” Cider says.
“The register?”
“Yeah, the register,” Cider says pulling his piece and pointing it to the man's gut.
“The register,” the man complies.
“What the hell are you doing?” Anna yelps, afraid.
“What? we don't have any money.”
“It's just a coffee you lunatic,” she says. He glances over to her, taking his eye off the clerk and shrugs while giving her an apologetic face The clerk, who has an ice block of a body, jumps the counter, tackling Cider into a rack of candy and grabbing at his gun.
“Oh crap,” Cider says as the man wrestles him to the ground, knocking over the rack of candy and cigarettes, two shots go off in the tussle, though hitting no one.
“We have to get out of here,” she yells.
“One minute,” Cider grunts as the man snarls with a blood flushed face, raging with all the instincts of survival he has, and gets the upper hand enough to pin Cider down to the linoleum floor. Restraining his arms, and screaming with spit flying from his mouth, when Cider shoots grazing the man’s glazed doughnut filled stomach, and bursting his right bicep clean off his arm. The man kicks and screams in shock and agony. Cider pistol whips him and rolls his dense body off to flail on the reddening floor.
“Oh my god!” she screams struck with horror, “I thought you were supposed to be good at this?”
“The best,” he says, “what? I didn’t kill him. About his arm is a shame but I was going for a graze of the stomach.”
“No!” she shouts drawing the chrome he gave her from her hoodie pocket. Breathing heavy rapid breaths on the verge of hyperventilation. Holding the barrel down her line of sight as best she could in trembling hands, and fumblingly shoots to the left of Cider, through the open front door of the store. Her expression shifts from disbelief to mortified, then she breaks into a hysterical bawling. He looks through the door to see a man holding a gun and a badge, gasping for air and clutching at his own bloody shoulder. Falling to the ground with a grave wound but not a mortal one, if help arrives soon enough. She drops the hot weapon, and puts her palms over her eyes, distraught, refusing to see what her hands have done. Thinking the bang was so loud the shot must have killed him.
“Oh shit,” he says looking to her as consolingly as he can muster, though also seeing her with a twisted sense of admiration, of her becoming a bit more like him. She covers her face with the scarf he gave her, already tear soaked from her uncontrollable sobbing. With her eyes closed she sees the split second she pulled the trigger, the flash of the muzzle and deafening noise, the heat of the gun and the man falling to the street under a morning sun. The scene replays in her mind over and over again, thousands of times over a few seconds that feel like an eternity.
“Are you okay?” he asks softly.
“Hey! Anna! Anna! Carrots!” He picks up the warm gun. She roars like a mourning lioness, before she uncovers her eye's showing him her dismayed face of sobbing tears as big as slugs sliding down her blood red cheeks, soaking her new pink scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. He stands close, a nose away, staring directly into her distraught eyes, and speaks as soothingly as he can.
“Are you coming?” he asks not wanting to persuade her, not having the heart to force her to follow him, but wanting for her to make her own choice, take her chance. He silently relishes watching her face, his expression is seething with suspense for her reaction, a feeling sullied by the guilt he feels for her present circumstance.
“Home,” she mutters.
“I promise,” he says, taking her trembling wet hands, warm with her crying eyes. Linoleum then concrete underfoot as they step over the writhing clerk, and the barely breathing authority. The two weave back into the morning light, him leading her by the hand through the morning crowd, with heads down. She starts dry heaving, and the crowd of people open around her. She gets a hot flash and a gush of fluid from her stomach into her mouth, then vomits on the middle of the sidewalk. Of all the passing pedestrians passing judgment, one woman blurts out “junkies” in seeing their dirty clothes and unwashed, stressed out faces looking strung out.
“Live a little ya' dry clam,” Cider shouts back “Screw em. Are you okay?”
“No,” she whimpers.
“A smoke?” he asks, pulling red apple from his pocket.
“No...thank you,” she says hocking through her throat, “Billions of billions of stars, you said?” she says spitting, searching for a way to excuse her conscience from her actions.
“Yeah, that’s right Carrots, trillions of skies and infinitely more. So chin up, in a different place that man killed you, it just turned out this way this time,” He says, “it's only a matter of chance which side you’re on.”
“Possibly,” she says meekly, frozen in an unwavering gaze at his alabaster face staring back at her sympathetically as she yearns for something from him to spare her conscience.
“The odds, it’s just the odds,” he says, and they continue through the morning crowd. Anna’s weak kneed stumbling along like she's inebriated. Again swimming through the suffocating tide of blue suited shoulders and briefcases and purses.
“There it is,” he says joyously, relieved at the sight of the rain runoff flowing over the sides of a long open track. Looking like a long stout waterfall splashing down onto a sparsely filled asphalt parking lot six feet beneath it. The two splinter from the currents of the crowd and stand at the end of the platform, alone, together. He with a hand in his pocket staring at her, who's staring at the track that’s underwater and above ground. Wondering why it won’t drain and why there are fish swimming through it.
“Anna, what is it, something strange?”
“Always,” she says trying to smirk.
“We got some Ribbits,” he says, “don't turn too fast to look”
“What are Ribbits?” she asks.
“The IBI....InterAlto bureau of investigations. The pencil pusher’s that’re always on my h
eels. We call em’ Ribbits. There's three of em headin' toward the station from the street we just came from,” he says to her, who’s stuck in place struck by panic. Struggling to stay calm with the adrenaline of fight or a flight flushing through her while outwardly petrified.
“Be calm, the train’s coming, look toward the light,” he says, putting his right arm over her shoulders, and his left in his waist.
“To the left,” he says.
“I see it there, it’s getting closer,” she says nervously.
“Don't move!” A man of the three suited men shouts with authority.
“Pencil necks,” he says loathsomely.
“Cider! stay where you are!” Shouts another.
“Anna, I’m going to turn and move toward them,” he whispers into her ear. The three men draw their guns, training them toward Cider who's standing on Anna’s right, opposite their approach.
“Step away from the girl and drop your weapon! Immediately!”
“Will we make it?” she asks in a whisper just as he roughly slides his right arm around her neck, and turns to his right to her body as a shield. Holding the handle with his left, with his finger on the trigger of his hand gun pointed right at her head.
“Back up, get the back, or I'll shoot. I'll kill the girl, I will!” He shouts in her ear and over her shoulder.
“What? No, no, I thought you would help me, liar. Liar! No, help me, please help me!” She cries to the Ribbits. Her words are grating to his empathy. Feeling his nerves flinching, and his grip around her neck loosen, she flails her arms frantically squirming in fear for her life. Red faced and squealing and snarling like a trapped animal.
“Stop!” he grunts, “stop moving!” trying as hard as he can not to lose his grip on around her scarf as she struggles to be free from him, from his fate and the danger of being around him. He convinces himself that she'll be better off with him, where he wants her to be, despite the threat of eternal prison or death. I’ll keep her safe he thinks, I'll protect her from myself. Thinking of letting her go for a second, but he can’t, wanting too much for her to be near to him. Knowing he'll be captured and she will be locked away when the dying man in the street, the one she shot to save him, catches up to her.
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