by Chloe Garner
“Why not?” Paul pressed.
“Because they aren’t ready,” Lizzie said. “I know you think this is really hard, but they’ve learned not to trust anyone, and they don’t even really trust me. Trying to introduce new people to them… It isn’t a good idea.”
“You always wear the same clothes,” Giselle observed suddenly.
“Yeah,” Han said. “Bad ones.”
Lizzie sighed and shrugged. If she was going to admit it to anyone, oddly, these were the people she would do it with.
“I lost my car,” she said. “And all of my stuff. A furling fried my phone, and when I came here, I was out of money.”
“I have money,” Han said, digging into his pocket. Lizzie shook her head.
“I won’t take your money.”
“Why not?” Paul asked.
“For one, pride,” Lizzie said. “I’m working, I’m making money, and I’m going to figure it out on my own, but also because your parents are showing a lot of trust, letting me talk to you on your own. If any of them thought I would even consider taking cash from you…” She shook her head. “That’s just not a good idea.”
“What do you mean you lost your car?” Giselle asked. Lizzie stretched her mouth. This was embarrassing, especially in front of a trio of teenagers.
“I got out when I got here,” Lizzie said. “And I followed furlings for a few hours, trying to figure out where the… the people like us were. When I thought of it again, I realized I had no idea where I’d left my car.”
“We can find it,” Paul said. Giselle nodded.
“Where did you leave it?”
“In a little strip mall parking lot,” Lizzie said. Three smart phones materialized and they started pulling up maps.
“What was there?” Han asked.
Lizzie struggled to remember. There were a few logos that had stood out, but she didn’t recognize a lot of them, so she hadn’t remembered them. She gave them the name of the grocery store and the one other thing she could think of.
“And I think there was a vet’s office,” she said. There was a pause.
“Walking distance,” Paul muttered.
“I’ve got an animal supply store,” Giselle said, reading off a list of stores. Lizzie nodded, her heart rate picking up.
“That’s it.”
“Let’s go get it,” Han said. She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Just give me directions. We aren’t going anywhere.”
Han looked dour, but Giselle showed Lizzie her phone.
“You walked a long way,” she said, and Lizzie nodded.
“I thought I had.”
The shopping center wasn’t that complex a walk, but it would be a long one. She’d have to push if she was going to be able to drive back and find a parking spot by sundown.
“You can find that?” Giselle asked.
“Yeah,” Lizzie said.
“Call me if you get lost,” Giselle said, and Lizzie smiled.
“Thanks.”
She was going to have her car again. Changes of clothes. An enclosed place to sleep. Things she had taken for granted her whole life. It was overpowering. She tried to keep it to herself for the rest of the hour, then Magda and the other parents came back and the teenagers went home, and Lizzie set off.
She was going to have her car again.
***
She walked all afternoon and into the evening before she got to the shopping center. It didn’t look familiar to her at all, until she actually got to the parking lot and was looking at the spot where her car had been.
Bad things had happened.
Zee was actively trying to kill her, now.
But her car not being there might have been the hardest yet.
She swallowed hard and went to sit on the curb.
She’d called her dad, the day she’d gotten her cell phone, because he at least had a land line that hadn’t changed since she was a kid, and she’d memorized it.
“Will you get in touch with Robbie for me?” she asked after she told him that she’d moved to Pittsburgh and was still sorting out her phone.
“No,” he said. “You can do that yourself.”
“Can you give me his number?” Lizzie asked. “Did Mom write it down anywhere?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not getting involved, Liz.”
She’d sighed, appreciating a familiar voice, but the bit of hope that she could have reached Robbie and Trevor dying a hard, pitiful death.
The car was harder.
Without her car, she was stuck here, on her own, without any way of escaping. Yeah, the furlings would probably kill her if she tried to run away, but without her car, there wasn’t anywhere to go, at all.
And she’d come to terms with not having it, but that glimmer of hope… She swallowed again.
And then her phone rang.
“Did you find it?” Giselle asked.
“It looks like it got towed,” Lizzie said.
“Can I come get you?” Giselle asked. Lizzie thought about the walk home in the dark and she bit her lip.
“Okay,” she said. “Yeah.”
“I’ll just tell my mom your car got towed,” Giselle said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Lizzie nodded and hung up, looking at the empty spot for the entire time, standing up only when Giselle stopped next to her.
“Let’s go get it,” Giselle said. Lizzie shook her head.
“It’s late. You can just drop me off at the park.”
“My mom gets it,” Giselle said. “I want to help.”
Lizzie considered as Giselle pulled out of the parking lot, then nodded. It meant that much to her.
“Okay.”
Giselle poked at her phone for a minute, then frowned.
“They have a private tow service,” she said. “They’re closed for the night, and it’s going to cost two hundred dollars plus twenty dollars a day.”
Twenty dollars a day was almost as much as she was making every week. She’d left it sitting there for three weeks. If they’d towed it immediately, that was a six hundred dollar bill. Lizzie tried to not let it show.
“Thank you, Giselle,” she said. “You can just take me back to the park.”
Six hundred dollars got her into an apartment.
That was her priority.
Giselle looked at her carefully for a moment.
“You aren’t getting your car back,” she said. Lizzie shook her head quickly.
“I have things I need to take care of, first. Maybe I can get it later.”
Giselle twisted her mouth to the side, then reached into the back seat.
“Take this,” she said, handing Lizzie a heavy jacket.
“I can’t,” Lizzie said.
“You can,” Giselle said. “It’s mine. I’ll get a new one.”
It was so warm against her arms, and another night on the roof of the building was crushing to her. Giselle nodded, and Lizzie nodded back.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Giselle said and continued the drive back to the park.
***
The coat made a world of difference to her. She pulled her knees up into it that night and actually slept warm for the night. The next morning, Zee was there.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Where do you go, when you aren’t here?” she countered.
“Home,” he said. “Where did you get that?”
She shook her head.
“None of your business.”
“You aren’t always here when I get here,” he said. “You need to be here.”
“You should plan further in advance,” she answered. “I’ll be here when I’m here.”
“You missed the battle yesterday,” he said, and she looked around the rooftop. No one had said anything to her.
“You need to tell me,” she said. “In advance.”
He shook his head.
“There’s nowhere else for you to be,” he sa
id. “You should be here.”
“There is somewhere else for me to be,” she answered, “and it’s none of your business. You tell me when you want to hold battles, and I’ll be there, but I need time in advance to plan.”
“That’s not how it works,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“You be here, or one of them will die,” he said. “That’s why.”
“You can call me,” she said. He shook his head.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” he said.
He didn’t care. She just couldn’t find a way to get a lever on him, to make him do something when he didn’t care about her or anyone else. She shrugged down into her jacket. She had money in her purse and she had an apartment picked out.
One more week of this, and she would have a shower.
She wouldn’t have much else to go with it, but she would have a shower, and right now she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more.
He kicked her, and she stood, looking him in the eye.
“They’re going to kill you,” he sneered. “Any day.”
“I look forward to disappointing you,” she said. “I’m not staying here forever. If you want to reach me, you can call me.”
“They’re going to die,” he said.
She felt a surge of anger and she shook her head.
“You can’t tell me that I make no difference and then try to hold that over my head as blackmail. It’s either one or the other. And I’m going to make a difference, but if you want me there, you can call me.”
He glared at her for a minute longer, and she thought he might take a swing at her, then he pushed her into the wall and left. She looked up at the sky.
It was going to rain.
That was just the kind of day it was going to be.
***
Rat went missing that afternoon. It felt like everyone knew what had happened to her, but no one would tell her.
“Is she dead?” she asked Slug. He shrugged. Wouldn’t look at her.
“Did Zee kill her?” she asked.
“Mercy,” he said. “You aren’t making it any better.”
“I’m trying,” she said. “I am.”
He looked at her with a quiet, slow sadness and he sighed, then he wandered away. She had speaking relationships with a few of the other hooligans, and she tried to ask them, but no one would tell her anything.
“Come on,” she said to Blister. “What’s going on?”
He looked at her with bored eyes.
“Why do you think I care?”
“I don’t care if you care,” she said with new anger. “I just want to know what you know.”
He shook his head.
“Like talking to a plant,” he said, shrugging and walking away. She watched, feeling helpless. There were so many things she wanted to do, and just so few resources to do it. She just needed more time to get things together, but something terrible could happen any time.
It may have already.
She was getting ready to go out to find food when Zee came back.
“We’re going,” he said.
“Where?” she demanded. He glared at her and clenched a fist, but he didn’t touch her. Everyone else picked themselves up from their various corners and started toward the stairs. Lizzie watched as they went by, standing across from Zee to form an aisle that they all went through. They didn’t break off eye contact, the two of them, until Zee turned to go down the stairs.
“You will come,” he said, “or one of them will die.”
“I never intended to not come,” she said. “I know this is what I’m here for. But we’re above starving homelessness, and I’m going to fix it. That takes time, and you’re going to have to deal with that.”
He stopped and looked up the stairs at her.
“No. I’m the demon. I don’t.”
She sighed, waiting just a moment to see if some inspiration struck her, but there was nothing to do. She followed.
***
They walked for longer than normal, this time, away from downtown and out toward the suburbs. Cars passed them and people honked, and Lizzie shrugged deeper into her jacket, thankful for the cover it gave her. The days were getting cooler, and someone at the park yesterday had said there would be snow soon. Maybe in the next week. Lizzie desperately wanted to be in an apartment with heat by then.
Heat.
She was going to have to pay utilities again.
She started mentally adjusting her budget once more, trying to eke out the numbers to make it work.
She needed more clients. More time. More money.
She was going to be in the apartment, regardless of whether she had heat, though. Shelter was better than nothing, and she’d figure out the heating bill another time.
They continued on until they reached a set of soccer fields out in the middle of a large suburban park, and Zee stopped in the middle of one of them. Lizzie looked around in horror at the kids playing and shook her head.
“Not here.”
“Get in place or get out of the way,” Zee said.
“You’re going to kill someone,” Lizzie said, looking over her shoulder. The hooligans were already started for the woods around two sides of the fields, probably looking for cover more than anything else. Zee shook the ground, closing his eyes with a sort of maniacal glee, and she fled, looking for her power.
There were only a few furlings around, at this point, but she could feel the groundswell of them coming, and as she watched, two popped out of the back of Zee’s head in rapid succession, with a third and a fourth following just as she stopped and stood there.
Another.
And another.
She was going to have to absorb all of them.
All of them.
Another.
She turned and continued on, hoping that her radar was working despite how distracted she was, but mildly afraid that she was just making for the woods, too, in hopes of being out of the way by the time Zee did something to really bring down destruction.
Little had she thought it, but the wind changed. She smelled rain, and the kids started running for cover as it came down seconds later in sheets.
Zee stood in the center of the field surrounded by a sort of ambient glow from the soccer fields themselves, furlings pouring into sight and milling around him, swiping at each other in a kind of impatience that seemed out of character.
There was no play there. Just malice.
The storm picked up as Lizzie found her spot and stood, just outside of the tree line, miserable in the wet. She felt the hooligans where they were along the tree row, waiting for someone to do something, but no one did. Zee shook the ground and the furlings jolted into action, more joining second by second. They tore at the fields as they attacked each other. Lizzie watched with a sort of helplessness that there was simply nothing to distract them from their destruction. Nothing anyone could do. The hooligans had given up completely on this one and just watched as Zee called in another wave of furlings, shaking the ground and actually knocking Lizzie to her knees. She pushed herself to her feet again and pulled at the power under her feet as hard as she could, but it was like Zee had a meat-fisted grip on that, too. She could barely even feel it was there as the last cresting wave of furlings hit the park and they started to really merge in earnest.
There were hundreds of furlings on the two soccer fields who were the size of dogs, and dozens the size of horses, running around and fighting, tearing great hunks of turf out of the fields, water beading down their oily black coats. Lizzie could hear nothing but the storm and the sound of hissing as they fought and she stood by, unable to do anything.
The glow sucked off of the fields until it was just a dim idea of what had once been a pleasant play place, but the furlings were still in great numbers, attacking each other and causing more damage. The goals bent back as a pair of furlings bounced off of them, merging into a single furling the size of an elephant. Zee was laughing as h
e rattled the earth once more.
Lizzie was losing.
She had nothing left to hold onto, and when the ground moved under her feet, she fell and stayed down.
That was when the first lightning bolt hit the field.
A furling vaporized with it, and most of the rest scattered into the trees, but it wasn’t over. Lizzie could feel it.
Two more lightning bolts hit the field, vaporizing another pair of huge furlings, then the storm let loose on the forest, a dozen bolts hitting trees behind Lizzie. A big furling breathed hard at her from nearby, and she started running, knowing what was going to happen next. The lightning hit when she was barely two dozen feet away, and while her first thought was that it killed her, because the world went dark and quiet, the smell of burnt hair told her that she was just stunned.
Her sight came back first, a fraction of a second later, but her hearing didn’t return at all as she stood, looking around dumbfounded at the orchestra of lightning around her. She couldn’t feel the hooligans around her anymore, but she guessed that they were all fleeing the furlings, too, trying to find a place where they weren’t going to get electrocuted from the storm.
She had to fight him.
She couldn’t just stand by and watch as Zee did this.
She went back to her spot, feet away from a huge scorch on the ground where a tree had blackened, and she pulled at the light, but it slipped away from her like a withering vine, dead. There was nothing there anymore. Zee laughed again, and there were more bolts of lightning, then the rain intensified again, and she couldn’t even see him.
She gave up.
Went to stand under the tree line where the water was still torrential, but at least not suffocating, and she just waited it out.
There was nothing else she could do.
***
The walk home was miserable, dark, and cold.
The storm brought with it a wave of cold air that froze her skin everywhere a hard wind could find it, and her coat helped little, because of how wet it was. She was better off than most of the hooligans, though, out in worn-out shirts and torn jeans and nothing more. They huddled against the wind as best they could and made their way back to the abandoned building, not going up on the roof this time, but huddling in a corner as a group.
