Angel Of The City

by Leahy, R. J.

  It’s four blocks before we stop at the back door of a non-descript duplex. Broad-shoulders knocks and a man opens the door, a little older than me. They exchange words and it’s clear the old man is none too happy. But a meaty finger thrust into his chest a few times changes his mind and he relents, angrily waving us inside.

  The men lay the basket carrying Pen on the floor of the kitchen. In the bright light of the room she looks even worse and I’m beginning to think we’re too late.

  Broad-shoulders introduces Abby and me. “This is Dr. Buyam; works at the clinic in the two sixty one. Does a little work for me on the side as well.”

  Buyam is just under six feet tall, graying at the temples with a pencil thin mustache and wire-rim glasses. Lighter than broad-shoulders, he’s glaring at me with intense hazel eyes.

  “Two hundred,” he says. “And no argument.”

  I reach into the envelope Devon gave me and peel away the exact amount, laying it in his hand.

  His attitude eases up a bit when he sees the money, but not by much. Under his direction, Pen is gently removed from the basket and laid out on a long dining room table. Abby stands near her head and strokes her hair.

  Buyam removes the blood-soaked bandages and shakes his head as he examines the wound. “Significant tissue damage, but it looks like the bullet missed the major arteries. She’s lost a lot of blood though.” He pulls a medical bag from a side table and digs through it, coming out with a needle and glass vial. Grabbing Pen’s exposed arm, he sticks the needle in a vein and the vial begins slowly filling. “I need someone to go to the clinic.”

  “I’ll go,” I say.

  He looks incredulously at me. “And just how far do you think you’d get, you white fool?”

  Broad-shoulders grins and waves one of his men over.

  Buyam hands the man the blood. “Give this vial to Jennine in the lab. Tell her to cross and type for four units of whole blood—and tell her to keep it off the record. Wait for her to run the test, then bring the blood back here.”

  With the runner gone, he rolls up his sleeves. “The rest of you get in the living room and let me work in peace. And keep your hands off my shit.”

  Abby hesitates.

  “Go on,” he says, his tone only slightly kinder. “You can’t help her. You’ll only get in my way.”

  I open my eyes and see Buyam sitting in a chair across from me, smoking a cigarette. I’m half-lying, half-sitting on a couch, Abby sleeping next to me. Everyone else is gone.

  “Enjoy your nap?” he asks, in a tone like he just caught me screwing his daughter.

  I rub my eyes. “It’s been a long few days.”

  “I don’t want to know anything about it.”

  “How is Pen?”

  He grunts. “Alive, but another hour and she wouldn’t have been. She’s getting the last of the blood now.” He takes a long draw of the cigarette and studies me like he’s trying to decide where to put an incision. “Interesting scar on the back of your head.”

  Instinctively I reach back and put my hand over it.

  “A little late for that. I’m a surgeon you idiot; surgeons are drawn to scars like a dog is drawn to another dog’s ass. Pretty sloppy work. Almost like someone tore something out.” The wall clock ticks away the seconds as we stare at each other, the smoke curling around his face. “Does she know?” he asks, nodding at Abby. “Does anyone know what you were?”

  I look again at Abby, but she’s still out. With Devon dead, the answer is easy. “No.”

  He takes a final drag off the cigarette before crushing it out in the ashtray and standing. “Punto will be back in a couple of hours. I don’t know where he’s taking you and I don’t want to know. When he gets here, I just want you out of my house, you Cosag bastard.”

  Punto, the man I’ve known only as broad-shoulders, returns just as dawn is breaking. Pen is still out, but Buyam promises she’ll wake in a few hours and should make a full recovery. A broken-down truck with a canvas tarp covering the back pulls up and we load Pen in, then climb in the back with her. Punto joins us as one of his men drives toward the western edge of the Heights quarter. The truck has seen better days, but it’s the first private vehicle I’ve been inside of in many years and I tell him so.

  “Belonged to my dad, and his dad before him. Granddad worked for a moving company back in the day. Had permission to drive it home at night. The company and its owner got caught up in the Chojo riots of ’03 and they burned him and the place to the ground. Nobody came for the truck, so granddad just kept it.”

  “Then it’s not registered?”

  “Oh yeah, they give everybody in the Heights a license. Don’t be a fool, ‘course it ain’t registered.” He leans forward. “I’m taking you to an unused nest. Buyam says the girl should be able to walk ok in about a week and I want you all out by then. I don’t care where they eventually find you, but they sure as hell ain’t going to find you here.”

  “I’m sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused you,” Abby says.

  “Lady, I got troubles every day, but you scare me.”

  The admission obviously surprises her.

  “All this talk about the Angel of the City, got people’s hopes up,” he continues. “They believe in her; they believe she’s going to make everything better.”

  “All I can do is try.”

  “Try? Ain’t nobody going to give a shit if you tried. They want things to change and when it don’t, people are going to get angry.”

  “At me?”

  “You? Hell, they don’t even know you, not for real. You think any of these people could pick you out of a crowd? All they know is the Angel; they know the idea. When that idea dies, then someone going to take the blame. Maybe they blame this resistance of yours. Or maybe they blame another quarter, one they just know are full of informants, or another clan they don’t even got to try to hate. Ain’t no way of telling how it goes down. And that’s what scares me.”

  He looks sharply at her. “You’re like a match hanging over a city-sized tank of gasoline. When you finally drop, lots of people going to get burned. That’s the only reason I’m doing this. However it ends, I want to be able to tell people I helped; I helped the Angel of City. Might be the only thing that keeps me and mine from going up in the flames.”

  The nest is pretty much what I expected: two rooms and a bathroom in the back of a building, which from the street, looks to be completely demolished. No kitchen, but there’s a hot plate and mini fridge on the floor near a few cases of bottled water. Electricity is rigged in from somewhere. One of Punto’s men drops a bag with clothes for Pen: pants and a thick cotton shirt. The thin dress Devon put her in is useless in this cold.

  Pen begins to stir by lunchtime. She’s groggy and confused but seems much better already. Her color is back and she’s no longer sweating. With Abby’s help I get her up in a chair and give her one of the pain pills Buyam sent with her. I’m surprised when she says she’s hungry, but take it as a good sign.

  There’s mostly just dried fruit and canned meat stacked near the water, but no one complains. After we’ve eaten I look at the wound. Buyam may have the bedside manners of a dusted-up Doberman, but he’s good. The wound has been debrided and skillfully closed. There’s no bleeding and the bandages are dry. Still, a week isn’t much time to heal before we’ll have to leave. I hope the pills hold out.

  With Abby and I helping, we have Pen take a few steps around the nest before lying her back down and soon she’s asleep again.

  I sit near the partially open door, watching the sunset. Abby is sitting with Pen near the bed. For some reason the silence between us feels awkward. Since leaving Buyam’s place she’s been distant, almost hesitant to get close to me.

  “What did you do before?” she asks.

  “Before?”

  “You know what I mean. You weren’t born a shade. You’re obviously well educated. What did you do? What kind of work? ”

  The truth is out of the que
stion, so I make the lie as simple as I can. “You’ll have to give my mother credit for the education. I was home schooled and went to work as a day laborer as soon as I was old enough.”

  “I see,” she says, but doesn’t sound convinced. “Your mother must have been very disappointed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “All that work to teach you; all that effort to lose your accent, just to become a laborer?”

  “I see what you mean. I guess I was a disappointment to her in a lot of ways.” The conversation makes me uneasy, so I shift it back to her. “What about you? You don’t seem like the math type.”

  “Math type? You mean a mousey little girl with pale skin and glasses perched on the end of her nose?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s a stereotype. Most mathematicians are actually risk-takers. You have to be; it’s the nature of the profession to push the envelope, to put yourself out on a limb trying to prove the un-provable.”

  “You make it sound dangerous.”

  She smiles. “All right, so maybe I’m overstating it. The only real harm you risk is to your ego, and then only if you’re wrong. But I’ve always loved math. There’s a certain kind of perfection in numbers.”

  “Perfection? You really are a romantic.”

  “And you’re not the hard case you try and make yourself out to be.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because Reed wouldn’t love someone like that.”

  I just stare at her. I don’t know how to answer, probably because there’s nothing I could say that she would understand. She grew up in the Garden, where people have enough to eat and attend lavish parties and where the future is full of promise, not suffering.

  That Reed loves me I have no doubt, just as I know that I love her, but it’s a different kind of life here and a different kind of love. We can’t look forward to a better future. The best we can hope for is to hang on; to avoid being sucked down into the despair that drives so many to coal, or worse.

  If you’re lucky, you find someone like I found Reed and you cling to that person like flotsam, using one another to stay afloat in the stagnant pool of loneliness and misery that makes up the world we live in. Most days it’s enough and I’d hate to think of a world without Reed in it, but if the world were different, would she still be with me? I don’t know the answer to that and I’m not sure I want to. But it doesn’t matter because the world isn’t different and so we’re all we have.

  I finally stammer, “I suppose not,” and lean back and close my eyes.

  ELEVEN

  The next four days are claustrophobic. I’m used to lying low indoors for extended periods, but somehow having other people with me makes it harder to take. Pen sleeps for long hours on end, but Abby is as restless as I am, so it’s with a sense of relief as well as worry when we hear the truck pulling up near the building on the morning of the fourth day.

  Punto enters the nest and from his expression, I know I’m not going to like what he has to say.

  “Get your things. We have to move.”

  “Pen’s leg is still healing,” I say. “I thought we had a week?”

  “That was before your girl here died.” He shoves a crumpled piece of paper in my hands. It’s a flyer, the words blood-red against a black background:

  The Angel of the City murdered!

  Treachery!

  Betrayal!

  Trust no one!

  I hand the flyer to Abby.

  “But I’m not dead.”

  “Maybe you ain’t, but the Angel of the City is,” Punto says. “Shit’s happening all over the city. People have gone crazy, lining up along the borders and getting ready to tear into each other. Fighting already broke out between us and the Chojo with the damn Cosags just sitting on the sidelines, watching.”

  “We need to make it to the Bonifrei.”

  He shakes his head. “Ain’t no getting through east. Best bet is to head north, up through the Delphi, then around the other way. Take you longer, but there’s bound to be less fighting north. You know Counselors ain’t going to let people loot the Delphi.”

  “Can you get us there?”

  “I’ll take you as far as the Huenta, then you’re on your own.”

  “Thank you,” Abby says.

  “I ain’t doing this for you. Riot this size is going to bring every Counselor in the city out to the streets. If they find you here with the girl’s leg all stitched up, they’ll make an example of this whole quarter. I ain’t going to let that happen. Get in the truck.”

  We rouse Pen gently and explain what’s happened. She still seems foggy from the medication.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  “The Bonifrei quarter. I should be able to hide you both until this dies down.”

  “And then what? They’ll never stop looking for us. Where are we going to live?”

  My answer wouldn’t be helpful, so I keep quiet.

  Abby lays a hand on Pen’s shoulder. “We’ll be all right.”

  Pen jerks away, looking at her sister with an intentness I haven’t seen since that first night in my nest. “You’re too smart to believe that and I’m not that stupid.”

  With the help of another pain pill, Abby and I are able to get Pen into the back of the truck. There’s a bench up front and Abby and Pen take it while Punto and I crouch in the back, peering carefully from behind the tarp flap. The vehicle coughs and sputters before taking off with a sudden lurch, and soon we’re heading north toward the Huenta quarter.

  “So here’s how it’s going to happen,” he says. “When we get near the border, my men are going to stir some shit with the bean-eaters. Trust me, it won’t be hard to get them to jump. When the two sides go after each other, the Blueshirts and Cosags will have to get involved. That’s when you three will slip out of the truck and get lost in the confusion.”

  “We need to get to the one twelve,” I say.

  “Hey, don’t you ask me for nothing else, Bonifrei.”

  “No, I’m not. You’ve done more than enough. I just hope that when we get out of the truck, we don’t draw attention. If we should get caught, it won’t go down well for you.”

  He stares at me like I’ve just slapped him across the face and in a way, I have. However this plays out, I make a mental note to never step foot in the Heights again.

  “I help your girl there and this is how you pay me back? What more do you want?”

  “This truck.”

  He looks in disbelief for a second, then laughs. “Is that all? Want my girl too? Maybe with her face in your lap while you drive?”

  “No thank you.” I lean forward, risking a punch in the mouth to keep my voice down. “It’s over twelve miles from the border of the Huenta to the one twelve. There’s no way Pen can make it on her leg.”

  “So for that you want to steal my ride?”

  “Not steal.” I pull out Devon’s envelope and peel off a bill.

  He scowls. “A hundred?”

  “I’m over-paying. This truck is a piece of shit.”

  “Hey, asshole, this was my granddad’s.”

  “So it’s an old piece of shit.” I take out another hundred. “And this is just a rental fee. Once I have her safely stashed, I’ll leave the truck in the alley on the border.”

  He snatches the money. “Don’t think this sets things right by us. I see you in the Heights again and I’ll personally cut your balls off.”

  “I’d expect no less.”

  We drive the eight miles to the border of the Huenta quarter unmolested, passing hordes of people standing nervously outside their homes and apartments, all carrying homemade weapons and shuffling in the cold. Not everybody is looking to settle a score with another quarter. Some just want to live their lives in peace. But news of what’s happening in the rest of the city has spread. Riots are unpredictable. Mobs thousands strong have been known to roam the streets with no other purpose than wanton destruction. You
may not have much, but if it’s all you have, then you’ll protect it with your life.

  The truck pulls to a stop at an intersection marking the end of the Heights and the start of the Huenta quarter. Punto and I get out, along with his driver. It’s strangely quiet. This isn’t a heavily trafficked street but even so, I would expect to see a few brawny representatives of the quarter keeping an eye on things. Punto and his driver seem unnerved as well, their eyes flitting back and forth across the street. The tension in the air is so heavy it’s almost a physical quality; like the cold itself.

  “This is as far as I go, Bonifrei,” Punto says, his voice almost a whisper.

  “I’ll bring the truck back in a few days.”

  “If you last a few days,” he says, “but I ain’t going to hold my breath.” The two of them begin the walk back through the Heights.

  I want Abby and Pen to stay in the rear of the truck, but Pen’s had enough of hiding in the shadows and they both squeeze into the cab next to me. As we head north, we begin to see more people; only a few at first, but soon the streets become dense with screaming, wild-eyed rioters, all armed. Before long we’re completely surrounded by the mob and unable to move. People on both sides peer into the truck. It’s obvious we aren’t from this quarter and many of them are clearly not pleased to see us.

  “We have to get out and walk,” I say.

  Abby looks incredulous. “Are you insane?”

  “We’re stuck. If we stay here any longer they’re going to drag us out.”

  “But Abby is the Angel of the City,” Pen says. Her words are slow, almost thick from the pain pills. “Aren’t they rioting because they think she’s been killed? Why can’t she just tell people who she is?”

  “Because they wouldn’t believe her,” I say. “Punto was right. Abby isn’t the Angel, the Angel was an idea and as far as these people are concerned, the idea is dead. This is a mob, Pen. Mobs can’t be reasoned with. All they know is they’re angry and they want to take that anger out on someone and right now, we’re available.”