“Then he wasn't a good cop anyway. Besides I’m gonna shoot him before he can okay, no worries.”
“I'm worrying, that's a lot to worry about, but do you have to kill the guy?” she asks.
“What does it matter? do you want to be here forever? what's more important, staying out of the tombs, surviving, getting home? or one in an infinite number of that guy?”
“Don't do it...if you don't need to. Please,” she asks with puppy dog eyes.
“There’s an infinite number of you's, this is unfolding in an infinite number of ways. Do you want this one to be the one where you don't get away?” he asks.
“That's how you spare yourself from your actions, not me,” she says.
“Just tell the cop the kids are knocking over the store. okay,” he says begging.
“Okay,” she says, and the two stand silently avoiding each other’s glare, just out of the pip pip pipip of the condensation’s drizzle.
“Hold out your hand, let me see your wrist.”
“I said it was fine, let's just get this over with,” she says, unable to think of anything but the consequences of their plan to escape. The cost of their survival to others and of her own already questionable sense of justice. That all her senses of right and wrong, and the scale of existence, of what she's seen, felt and lived through to contemplate the infinite grays of the life she's been living with him. Resigning the moral compromises to circumstance, to necessities of surviving the path she's chosen in taking this stranger's hand to be the one to walk her home. She reaches to rub her cheek to show him it really is fine, though wincing at the pain shooting through her arm and shoulder.
He carefully extends his hand to hers while holding a pleasant expression with his palm open. She painstakingly reaches out until her hand is just above his. He eases his fingers as gently as he can around her wounded wing with all the dexterity his thief’s life has given him. Caressing her black and blue wrist while holding the most consoling face that he can sincerely have. Inspecting and lightly squeezing to her sudden sniffles and blinking winces.
“Owch,” she cries.
“Sorry, just tryin’ to see how bad,” he says.
“It's okay,” she says as she raises it an inch and nods as an accepting gesture, gulping in anticipation of the possible ache of his nurturing touch. Speaking as soothingly as he can, calmed from his usual self humoring self. Savoring being the one to tend to her, to console and comfort her, that she entrusts him with her safety at all. Her face loosens as her pain struck posture lightens to his touch. She feels, understands that he cares for her, for her well being. Feeling for the first time that she is not just on the road with him, but with him.
“It's not okay...Anna I'm sorry, we couldn’t at least go to a hospital, but we will, when we get outta here.”
“We'll make it through,” she says. Any ferocity in him fades to the gaze of her sniffling smile staring back at him. She leans in slowly, fixated on the obsidian of pupils, then feels the warmth of his breath touch her face. Her heart beat flutters like a robins throbbing breast, pulsing to the tips of her fingers and lips. She closes her eyes in anticipation for his for a second to long before his mouth meets hers. Their tongues tune to undulation of the other, settling somewhere in the middle, he tasting the salt of her tears as she tastes a tinge of blood from his cheek.
Pip pip pipip pip...
She winces. Biting his tongue when he steps closer to her, accidentally flexing her wounded wing when reaching to take her shoulder under his arm. She stands stunned for a second then looks at him bashfully and walks away without a word. Leaving him with a lump in his throat, as she snaps a supple smile over her shoulder, alluringly holding his attention.
“Anna!” he calls out. She doesn’t answer, instead keeping him in wonder, strutting away as smoothly as she can. Teasing a turn and perking her ears and eyebrows, like she hasn't heard him.
“Anna, no really, Anna.”
“Yes?”
“I need your gun.”
“Oh,” she says, then clumsily turns around, laughing and biting her lip with an embellishing blush at her assumption of him calling out for just her touch. Despite the danger ahead of them, she's more at ease in this moment then she's ever felt in her life.
“So the cop don't see it, and I might need it,”
“Be careful,” she says.
“Break a leg out there,” he says strumming her cheek with his thumb. He meets her with carnal eyes, though neither speak a word. She places the gun gently in his palm, and the two split toward their positions, through the sweat embalming balmy overcast enshrouding everything further than four hundred feet away and above in a stagnant steam. She shakes her hurt arm and blinks to ripen a painful expression and spur tears to streak, making her desperate face more believably distraught. She thinks of the officer and his loved ones here, in this time and place. Making her sob and truly weep to show the officer tears that are actually for his life, to deceive him, she hopes not to his death. Sauntering closer to the cruiser with sloped shoulders and head hung low, trying to reminisce despairs from her past, and the bleakness of her old life, though already almost forgetting when it was. Forgetting about getting into character, that she needs no help in looking haggard or as a desperate damsel in distress would.
Approaches cautiously as a mouse, coming close enough to make out their escape. Shaped like the nose of an airplane spanning six feet in width and eight feet long. Wingless with the entire round rear packed with thousands of tiny propulsive rockets. Anna scuttles up, frantically wrapping on the cruiser's mirrored window that wraps around three sides of the vehicle.
“Help! help me,” she cries. Startling the officer awake from his graveyard shifts nightly nap.
“Hey stop banging on the window lady!” Anna flustered and frantic shouts over him, as sweat and saliva fly from her face onto the officer’s shirt. A jolly seeming officer looking much like a seal, with bushy straight eyebrows and a fat dumpy body clumped comfortably in his seat. In grey blue with a brass badge, and clearly nearing retirement. Though at first upset with her barging behavior, he softens to her pleading and distressed demeanor, and becoming enraged when seeing her injured arm.
“What is it dear? what happened? has your man hit you?” he asks.
“No, no,” she wails, “I was attacked, they broke my arm please, please help me!”
“Yes, yes of course dear but I can't help if I don't know what's it that's happened to you.”
“Kids, the kids in front of the store, there's a bunch of them. One of them has a knife, help please they're robbing the store. They have my husband hostage, help please help me,” she pleads like her life depends on it.
“This is per, per..preposterous,” he stutters, still retaining a tone of authority “Where are they? where? I'll get ‘em. Damn rotten kids.”
“Uh, I Uh,” she stammers.
“You don't know? how?” The officer doubtfully asks.
“You'll have to take me there, it's the only way we can get there soon enough,” she says.
After a minute of skeptically staring her up and down, the officer says, “Get in the back.”
“And if you have to arrest one of them,” she says dreading the idea of being trapped that close to where she thinks she maybe should be.
“Fine, fine get in the side seat, hurry,” the authority commands. The door lifts vertically and closes behind her as her behind is seated. They take off with a burst of flame streaking from the rear of the rocket. Already speeding toward Cider who seems to be in a Mexican standoff with a drunk and otherwise intoxicated bunch of larrikin children. Though they’re actually listening to him explaining that it's not the people’s money he's taking, it's the banks, giving them his robin hood bit, and what the difference between the two is, to himself at least. The group is just surprised they’re meeting someone who's saying he’s from another dimension while standing right in front of them. Looking and speaking as though he is in fact from anot
her dimension.
“Hey kid you want a knife,” Cider says to a gray haired boy in a beaten yellow tweed jacket, who seems like the leader of the little rapscallion brigade.
“Yeah, I'll take a blade mister.”
“Where's it from?” asks one, then another and the next in a domino effect.
“Very far away from here,” Cider says.
“How far, yeah how far?” they ask.
“Think of everything place you've ever seen, ever been, every day you've lived yet. Then try to imagine if you could somehow see all of that at one time, in the same view. Now think of how expansive a scene you'd have to be seeing it in. Multiply that by every person you'd ever seen,” he says with the enthusiasm of a traveling salesman. Wanting to share with their childish imaginations the idea of the inconceivably immeasurable scope of even the simplest things, like their own lives. Sirens zoom in from far over his right shoulder, in seconds the cruiser is twenty feet behind Cider who puts his hands up, yelling.
“Help! help! officer they attacked my wife, that one has a knife!” Cider shouts, pointing to the tweed clad kid.
“Run!” one of them shouts.
“Freeze you little runts! If you run I shoot!” the officer says sternly. They don't move, petrified in place at the law and his loaded weapon waving back and forth over their crowd. The cop edges closer until he's between Cider and the youths.
“Drop it kid!” the sealish man demands.
“Of course, of course, but.”
“Drop it now!” the man shouts now red faced in anger. A chorus of beer bottles break against the pavement, at least two fall from the pockets of each little ruffian.
“Drop it...now,” Cider says slyly, while pointing his gun to the unsuspecting officer's face from ten feet behind him. Anna watches on in safety, through condensation dripping in streaks down the windshield, that she sees as the bars of a prison cell.
“What!?” The officer asks, in shock of what's happening.
“Drop it now. I’ll kill you if you even flinch,” he laughs, along with the bellows and whistles of the now drinkless troupe of larrikins.
“You, she, you tricked me,” the seal man flusters flabbergasted with flame in his eyes. Then quickly deflating in defeat, and dropping his weapon to the ground.
“Lay down, and stay down alright,” Cider says, strolling to the cruiser, to Anna with her knees on the dash riding shotgun. The cop lays face up with arms and legs together as though going to bed.
“That was crazy,” she says to herself.
“Did you see that,” says the tweeded kid.
“Hey kid,” Cider says.
“Yeah?” the boy asks in awe.
“Cut that radio wire on his walkie,”
“But he's a...Okay,” the youth says, then apologizes to the man as he severs his only link to safety, to backup, and the only way to stop the two from escaping. Another scoops the weapon from the sidewalk and weaves back into the group, his badge belt and baton are pilfered seconds later. Anna who'd watched the whole thing from the silence of the cruiser, opens the door from the inside, that vertically closes behind him as he sits for a second in silence, then lighting a smoke.
“I'm proud of you,” she says, sneaking a peck to his swollen cheek.
“I know, I'm great with kids, I should be a dad.”
“No, no...you should not,” she says.
“Oh,” he says sadly. Though never wanting children, a bit let down she's so dismayed by the thought.
“Then what?” he asks.
“You didn’t kill him, because you didn't have to,” she says tapping his knee encouragingly.
“Oh yeah, I forgot about all that,” he says. She shakes her head at him , giving up on trying to even trying to reason.
“Whatever. Can you fly this thing?” she asks.
“Yeah, why not,” he says.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Up in the air
The interior is a sleek black of something pretending to be a leather, nestled between an overwhelming number of gauges, and too many meters and dials to count, and a lot of graphs cover almost all the surfaces but the c shaped windshield wrapping around the cabin.
“Looks like a cockpit,” he says fastening his seat belt.
“Have you flown before?” she asks.
“No,” he shakes his head, “but I have a good feeling about this. Anyway, you ready?” he says with the confidence of not caring.
“I thought you'd know how to fly it,” she says, with the wind let from her sails.
“Why would you think that? you've been with me the whole time?”
“Ahh,....huh. I don’t know.”
“Oh, oh well. You ready?” he asks as he jams forward a silver handled lever in the center console he thinks is a shifter. It isn't.
“Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” she says as her answer becomes a scream that lunges back into her lungs. Her head’s pinned to the back of her seat by the G force of accelerating a bit slower than instantaneously past the speed of sound. In less than seconds they're rocketing through the parking lot caves of the Shallows. Through its shadows and sporadically placed streetlamps, scraping with sparks and screeching scratches of the windshield through the narrow causeways and catwalks between the brick walls of the Narrows. Then ascending and crashing through gyrating altocumulus undulatus bred of condensation cast from the congested causeways when giving way to the open air. He wobbles the lever back and forth frantically trying to slow but instead snapping their heads and bodies up and down, side to side as the rocket spins and tumbles soundlessly through an open space. Dizzying them until their thoughts vanish in the depths of a tumbling vertigo as they careen diagonally up through the air.
The seat belts strap only their torso to the seats, letting their arms and legs flail wildly around the cabin. Hitting dials and switches and making green and red and yellow lights blink and flash on and off over their helplessly afraid faces. They begin to spin so uncontrollably they come to feel as though they’re sitting still in erratic seconds long intervals of zero gravity. Freeing them from their dizziness long enough for her to get a glimpse of the four lane main street further down then a bird’s eye view. Cider tries his best to hold the silver lever of the center console at its center. Steadying the ship enough for him to steer, with more luck than skill, into a starboard slide while upside down that slows their rough tumble into an unraveling barrel roll. Then rocketing rapidly toward what looks like a massive blue scar of sky that is the summit of this city.
Rising out of the continual counterclockwise rotation of accumulating and releasing massive pockets of air pressures. Unleashes a sonic boom as a large open pocket a mile away gives way exploding outward as a series of wall shaking force sweeping tons of screaming steamy air across their windshield. The higher they get the less densely the sight suffocating brick surrounding them becomes, and the more steam and patches of clouds come to envelope their view. They break completely free of the shadows and sporadic lights simmering through the Shallows and the Narrows. Reaching the last of the congested streets, climbing ever closer to its scar shaped summit. As they break from one atmosphere into another, the windshield is white washed in sky blues. Blinding them as the cruiser submerses through bone resonating swathes of supersonic resonance, as a series of dense rolling seas of asperatus clouds. Hardly able to keep his fingers on the lever let alone reign the cruiser into his control, he jiggles it back and forth trying to learn on the fly.
Seconds later leaving the cloud sea far behind them. Now weaving in and out while vertically climbing the side of a massive anvil crowned cumulonimbus toward this places troposphere. Her silent screams through gritted teeth change from primal cries to ecstatic howling while the rocket tears through tufts of unrelenting turbulence. The cruiser quakes with each dip in and out of differently pressured patches of sky for miles more. Emerging from the crowns of the cumulonimbus clouds, then skipping like a stone upstream up a monstrous sky evacuating waterfall of th
ick rich vapor, that roars like lions when rumbling against their speeding cruiser. Her heart is pacing faster than she can perceive, and racing, stampeding until nearly bursting through her rib cage. Pulsating to her fingertips and tongue until they and her face start tingling to numbness. Her view fills with white speckles and flashes, on the verge of epilepsy as gravity pulls her eyes to the back of her brain. Meshing her mind with her sense of sight.
The higher their elevation the greater her elation grows, until she's barely able to breathe through ecstatic chirps of laughter. Enraptured by the throes of vertigo, if she could kick and scream in joy she would but her limbs are pinned to her seat. Completely engulfed in the loss of control over her senses, and losing her sense of direction, excused entirely from the distraction of thought. Soaring against the grip of gravity is sucking tears from her honey colored eyes, and rapidly flapping her cheeks to her ears. Though not stopping her excitement emblazoned smile from embellishing her to his gazing eyes. The sight of her is grazing his heart, as the intensifying G force squeezes their stomachs into their turbulence reverberated vertebrae.
The rocketing cruiser reaches unspeakable speeds, far past the speed of making any sound as she screams as loudly as she can in silence. Leaving a curved pillar of pillowy exhaust streaking up as they tear through the ceiling of the stratosphere. Boring a boulder sized hole through the mesosphere like a worm through an apple, then sailing meteorically higher. The cruiser passes the electric blue exosphere, taking her last breath a minute before passing into the ether above the light blue light rimmed auroral halo crowning the condensed city miles below them. The blood is draining from their desperately afraid faces, each thriving and alive in the fear of jetting faster than they could think, toward the unknown. She's clasping for his white knuckled fingers clutching the silver lever. He's watching her, and not the road though there’s no road to see. Ascending astonishingly fast then violently erupting from the very last cumulonimbus clouds. The rocket and its pillar like wake are tersely tossing through even the slightest noctilucent sheets of vapor that remain of the atmosphere. Their bodies are tingling with pins and needles, and mouth is dried from shouting through her G force quaked face.
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