by Jae Vogel
I chucked the phone at the wall with all of my strength. As weak as I was, the phone was government issue, which meant it was a total and complete piece of shit. The plastic broke on impact and the cheap screen shattered into more pieces than I could count.
"Focus, Daux… focus! OK. Bag."
I had the presence of mind to throw what little food I had into a bag, and grab a thermos of water. I also had a buck knife which was impractical as hell, and had actually been a gag gift that Hep had found by the railroad tracks one day. The knife had been covered in dried blood, and the handle was made of carefully woven leather cord. The blade was sharp, or at least it had been when he found it. Only problem was I didn't know how to use the damned thing, so it was probably more of a liability than anything else. I didn't have any drugs to bring with me, and my ID was trashed. One final look around the room told me that there was nothing here left for me. I knew that they would arrive within minutes, and I had to get the fuck out, so I left.
I was out the stairs which lead down into the bunker in a second, and up the hill of tall grass that grew next to the place where I lived.
There were a number of veritable squat houses in this part of town. Most of them owned by a hand full of absentee landlords who didn't keep very careful track of their assets. My friends and I preferred to live in places like that because the contracts didn't amount to much more than something the landlord could wipe their ass with. The records were usually hand written receipts that neither party was interested in holding onto, as long as rent was paid each month, and both people were left alone to live their lives. A certain economy of privacy came into play which allowed people who wanted to live more anonymously than others the luxury to be able to do that sort of thing, if they liked. It was really an ideal situation for a junkie, sex-worker to be in, considering that both habits included their fair share of social liabilities. You could get away with a fair amount of anonymity in your life until you were flagged, but once that happened, God help you, because nobody else will.
I had just made it to the abandoned building up along the far end of the vacant lot when the cops showed up. I ducked, daring only to expose the top of my head as I peaked out at the sheer numbers of cop cars that showed up in front of the bunker.
I counted five police cars in total. They swarmed the place and came out from the inside of their cars with full gear on and assault weapons in hand.
Oh fuck... fuck, fuck.
My hands were shaking, and my breathing erratic. I watched as they kicked the door down and then ducked down behind the wall and took shelter.
I scanned the room, trying to figure out what I was going to do. They had to have known that I wasn't going to be able to go far. Looking up, I saw that this whole time, I had not been alone.
A little girl had been watching me from the far end of the room. We were both in a dilapidated single room studio that had long been condemned. Seeing the young girl in the same place that Hep and I had used to party so many times was unsettling, but what bothered me even more was that I knew I wasn't safe here, and that a swat team of five police cars is not a good place for a little girl to be.
I shooed her silently, telling her to get lost. She looked at me with clear intent in her eyes and encouraged me to follow. I didn't have too much going for me where I was, and so I followed.
As soon as we left through the back, I immediately realized what I was doing was probably the most asinine thing I could have done under the circumstances. The number of stories where innocent bystanders get shot - particularly kids - was too high to be discounted as simply speculative rumor. Fact was that the police weren't nearly as well trained, or accurate as they would like you to believe.
Nevertheless, I moved forward quickly through the rubble and grass, down the other side of the hill, toward the ghettos that populated the neighborhoods outside of the downtown strip. The little girl continued to look back to make sure I was following closely behind. She seemed nervous, and I wondered if she knew exactly how much was at stake here. I didn't even know her name, but she looked familiar somehow... I just couldn't fit a name to her face.
Eventually, she had me on my hands and knees, crawling underneath a hole in a wooden slotted fence. On the other side of the fence, she was waiting for me to come through the hole. Once I had gotten to the other side, she was waiting there with the biggest dog I had ever seen. He must have been a fucking mastiff. To be real, the dog could have easily either eaten the girl, or be used as a mount. One look at her eased my concerns slightly.
One hand was patting the dog under the chin, and the other finger was placed by her mouth.
"Shh..."
The first sound I heard from the little girl was nothing more than a hiss of air, followed by a warning growl from her gigantic friend.
"Nice doggy,” I said.
The little girl looked at me with scorn, and motioned for me to hurry up and get on the other side of the fence. Like an asshole, half of my body was still caught on either side of the fence. I crawled through, scuffing my knees on the rocks within the massive dog's domain. As soon as I had made it through, the girl dropped a panel on our side of the fence that was secured by a screw. The panel dropped with only a slight sound from the wood settling down into place.
“Hurry up!”
This little girl wasted no time in pushing me up from my knees. The dog lowered its head to give me one final glance, and then let out an enormous blow of snot at the ground by my feet. One yard led to another, and pretty soon, I found myself in a neighborhood I hadn’t spent much time in before.
“Alright kid, what the hell’s going on?”
“We’re almost there.”
We had been walking now for about a mile and a half through backyards, gutters, alleyways, and vacant lots, and I had followed without question. The farther away we got from the police, the safer I felt about the competency of my guide. At this point, curiosity had me, even if fear had left me behind.
We ended up walking up the middle of a long alleyway, covered on either side with wild, untended vegetation. Rotten apples were on the ground on either side of the alley. Every bit of earth that was available was filled out to the brim by some type of plant, or another. Ivy and grape vines climbed up the rusted iron gates, and huge cracks in the sidewalks were filled with little bits of life in the form of small flowers or moss.
The little girl walked forward and then turned abruptly into the kitchen of a small neighborhood diner. The sounds of dishes being put away, and the smell of freshly cooked meat immediately filled my nose. I looked around to find the kid, and didn’t see anything except workers bustling about in the kitchen. Then, the girl appeared once more from behind a huge baking oven and looked at me with exasperation.
“God, you’re slow. Will you come on already?”
She waved me into the building, and so I wandered into the back off the kitchen. I felt out of place, and dirty amongst people who worked like this — honest, hard working restaurant people. They were well fed and moved around with ease. The room smelled fantastic, and I had trouble focusing, but I kept up past the freshly baked loaves of bread and headed back into the rear end of the building.
We entered another prep room. The room was being cleaned by someone, but looked like it was in a state of rest, compared to the busy traffic of the kitchen. I passed an empty office to my right, and followed the little girl out another door to a courtyard garden between the bakery and an adjacent house. It looked like the bakery and the house were part and parcel of the same property. And there, sitting on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, was my friend Hep.
“Goddamn, took you long enough to wake up, yea?”
I ran over to him and gave him a hug so intense that I actually scared myself. Tears came out from the corner of my eyes and I watched as the girl rolled her eyes and headed up the steps and into the house.
“You’re not going to believe what happened,” I said.
Chapter 5
The first thing Hep did was bringing me into the kitchen and have one of the guys whip up some food for the two of us. We were sitting down at a corner booth, pushing omelettes into our mouths, following it up with coffee so rich it was practically mud sweetened with honey. He finished chewing, and then smiled at me after wiping his lips clean.
"Who's the kid?" I asked.
"That's my niece. Bright one, isn't she?"
"I mean, I guess. She sure knows her way around the outer city, no kidding about that. I didn't know half of those shortcuts existed. What gets me is that I'm not sure how she knew I was there. Did you tell her to come and get me?"
"We've been taking turns, staking out your house for the last week, Daux." He stopped eating, and set down his fork. "You disappeared. What were we supposed to do?"
I was going to say something stupid and quippy, but I decided to pursue a bit of roasted potato instead.
"You know how I feel about the police,” he said.
That much was true. There was no way that Hep would have pursued any sort of contact with the police or filed a missing person's report. I'd wager that he didn't even make any official inquiries at my work about my whereabouts. Hep was paranoid as hell, and apparently he had good enough reason to be.
"Yea, well, thanks,” I said.
"So, you going to tell me what's going on?"
I shrugged.
"I don't fucking know. Some weird shit happened at work the other day, and I'm pretty sure they brought me to some facility in Gratis."
"Facility? God, Jayne, what did you do?"
"Nothing... I mean, I don't think I did anything in particular. The simulation was weirder than normal. This guy was getting rough, you know, and he ended up pushing me pretty far. I'm pretty sure some part of the architecture broke down, because they think I assaulted him."
"Well, so what, the guy may have been an asshole, but it's just ones and zeros, I don't see why it's your problem if the system malfunctions and kills off an NPC."
"That's the whole problem,” I said, and paused for another sip of coffee.
"Dude was an actor, and apparently he's dead."
“Dead?”
"Jesus, Hep... calm the fuck down."
The dining room had two other guests at the moment. A young couple that looked like they were out on a date together. The woman looked to the side like she had tasted something bad. I knew it was a judgment on what we were talking about, because the food was legit. I waved and offered some bullshit excuse about my dog, then turned to Hep once more.
"For someone who has as many conspiracy theories as yourself, you sure don't know how to shut the fuck up."
"Sorry, Daux. I just don't know what to say."
He shoved a whole mouthful of chicken into his face, and chewed noisily. I stared down into my coffee and gave it a swirl.
"Yea, well... I can't say that I'm sorry he's gone."
"You didn't kill him, did you?"
"I'm not sure, but I'd wager that somebody thinks I did."
"Why do you say that?"
"A lot of heat at my place when I met your niece."
"No shit?"
I nodded.
"Packing, heavy. Maybe ten or so."
"That's not normal, Daux. Something else is going on…”
The dissonance in my memory flashed back to the image I got right before I left the Bunker.
"There's something else, but I'm not too sure about it yet. There are a lot of things in my head that just aren't lining up like they should."
"Well, you and I haven't made the best sort of decisions..."
"Look, this isn't an issue of smoking too much pot, or not being able to think clearly. I have no idea why that many cops showed up at my door, and to make things worse, I'm pretty sure that I was the one that trashed my apartment."
Hep stopped eating and stared at me with another mouth full of food.
"Cut that out,” I said. “You're looking at me like that with your mouth full again, it's kind of distracting."
"Well, I don't know what to say. Sometimes, we deal with some weird shit, maybe you were going through a flashback of some kind?”
"Maybe."
I picked up my coffee again, and brought the liquid to my lips. I just wanted something warm and soothing, and the coffee did its job in that regard. The couple that had been in the room cleared out, leaving Hep and I alone in the dining room.
I changed the subject.
"Nice place here… I didn't know you had family who were into this kind of thing."
"I don't share everything with people. Who knows why, but these folks don't go very well with alternative lifestyles. Last couple of weeks, I've been cleaner than usual, so…”
"Really? Well, me too."
"By choice?"
I shook my head.
It was clear that both of us would have preferred to get more fucked up than not. The suggestion was all that was really necessary to really entertain the possibility. I looked down at the food I was eating and recalled that I didn't actually remember the last time that I had enjoyed a decent meal.
"Shame to put this to waste."
"Enjoy, that's what I say. The food is on the house. I do work for my Uncle every now and then, and that evens things out as far as i'm concerned. You like it?"
"I mean, it's super hearty."
"Yea. Chicken omelettes. You're basically eating a fetus, and an adult, in the same dish."
I stopped what I was doing and stared down at the table.
"I'm pretty sure it's an embryo,” I said, “but that doesn't make the idea any more appealing."
"Well, technically, these are unfertilized eggs, which means it's more like menstrual fluid, mixed in with the corpse of a full grown member of the same species."
During his explanation, he happily continued eating, as though there were nothing inherently wrong with these observations.
I realized that there was nothing inherently wrong with enjoying my food, but the idea of eating a grown organism, in the medium of fried embryonic fluid was for some reason totally repulsive to me. My mind immediately imagined that it was the same chicken that had both laid the egg, and was then slaughtered later that afternoon. I realized that the only way this meal would have been more complete was if Hep had ordered a side of bone broth. I felt a pang in my stomach, reminding me once more that this was my first significant meal in any period of time, and that the alternative was peanut butter and sardines. Needless to say, I finished the omelette.
Hep and I took care of a couple of hours of dishes to make good on relationships with his uncle. The work that he did for them wasn't consistent, but as long as he didn't fuck up too badly, or get into some heinous shit, he told me that this place was open to him, and he liked to keep that source of good will available.
I have to say, my respect for Hep went up that day, but I wasn't exactly surprised. I would have asked him why he preferred a lifestyle like the one we shared, if this sort of opportunity was available for him, but the truth was I already knew the answer to that question. Sometimes, it's just easier to see those sorts of truths from another person's perspective. Like the harsh realities of our own decisions are more apparent when we're not living through them.
After we finished dishes and mopping up, Hep had a conversation with his uncle about a few things while I grabbed a beer from the tap. When he came out, he was grinning like he does when he's scored a hit. He waved his hips around at me and saddled up close to me with his strut.
I pushed him away, but it was all a joke.
"What's up?" I said.
"Let go out tonight and celebrate!"
"You're off you're head, man. Didn't you listen to anything I just said earlier? I have to lay low. Honestly, I had trouble staying focused on cleaning these dishes up just thinking that they might show up here."
Hep grew real quiet for a moment, and it was clear to me that I had actually hit on something.
"What's wrong?"
; He tried to push it off and regain his swagger, but instead he just smiled at me, grabbed my hand, and then walked me through the back of the restaurant.
We walked passed the prep tables, and into the backyard garden. There was a small passageway that led into a smaller alley between the houses. The pathway was literally no more than a gutter, two feet wide, sandwiched between property lines. To even get there we had to climb over a fence that was covered in a thick matt of jasmine vines.
When we got about three blocks away, and were relatively safe from any incidental echoes that may have come about from our conversation, he pulled me to him and gave me a kiss. The contact was so unexpected, that I didn't know quite what to make of it. We had fucked around before, but more often than not, it wasn't something we talked about, or even acknowledged during the scope of our relationship. The kiss was long, and his hand clutched onto the fabric of my shirt in a form of desperation. Hep was a bit of a romantic, but there was always a reason behind what he did. Some twisted logic no doubt, but always a reason.
I pushed him away from me, but just far enough to put some distance between our lips, but not far enough to where it felt like a rejection.
“Hep, you have to tell me what's going on..."
He paused again, then turned his head down toward the ground. After collecting his thoughts, he raised his head up once more and met my eyes.
"I don't know what was going on at your house, and I don't think we should pay too much attention to it right now. But, they called my Uncle and asked him to keep an eye out for the two of us."
My mind spun for a moment, and I began to understand the implications behind the story that were not being made transparent.
"You don't have anything to do with this. They tied you into it..."
"Well, it's not like our hanging out is a secret..."
"Fucking Priscilla..."
"Daux, you don't have to blame her."
We started walking together up the narrow pathway between the houses. Our voices were kept low, we walked side by side and a thin stream of water poured down between our feet.