Runner

by Samantha Lau

  He let a sigh of relief and quickly tried to undo the seatbelts. They were stuck. He pulled a knife from his utility belt and cut through them. The man fell against him, and he caught him with ease. His gaze lingered on those perfect features once more. Could such a beautiful person exist...? This had to be one of those designer babies, this level of perfection couldn’t be natural.

  A noise made him look up sharply, afraid it was Reapers. It wasn’t. It’d been just a piece of broken wall that, perched precariously after the crash, had finally ended up crumbling. But now that his attention was up, he couldn’t help but notice movement up in the sky. A larger second pod, banged up but completely in control still, was smoothly coming out of the clouds.

  Something told him they weren’t coming to help.

  He looked back at the wounded man and hesitated. What if he was wrong? What if it was someone coming to take this man back up to Sky City? But instinct told him otherwise, and his instinct had never failed him. With some difficulty, he hauled the beautiful man over his shoulder and hurried towards the run-down building the pod had crashed against. He went deep, the display on his eye switching to night vision, guiding him through the darkness. He finally settled his weight down behind a broken-down wall, just in time for the other pod to land. He hid behind the wall in turn, breathing a little heavy with the effort of carrying the other man. He took a couple deep breaths, eyes closing as he tried to center himself to the task at hand, and then peered out from around the wall. The display on his eye switched again, this time to allow him an unhindered view of the pods outside.

  Two men dressed head to toe in black, wearing some kind of gas mask, came out of the new pod. They pulled flashlights out from tactical belts, turning them on and rounding the crashed vehicle, inspecting the inside. They were carrying guns at their hips. They exchanged some words, too far to hear anything but incoherent mumbling. They turned the light toward the nearby buildings, one having his hand on his gun, the other outright pulling it out. Oren quickly hid back behind the wall, swallowing hard.

  “– can’t... gone too far.” Oren managed to make out one saying, as the one man had started walking deeper into the building they were hiding in. “Check that one.”

  Beside Oren, the beautiful man stirred and groaned in pain. Oren cursed inwardly and slapped a hand on top of the man’s mouth.

  Too late. That was some shitty timing he had.

  The flashlight moved back their way. “Hey, come here. I think I heard something!” one of the men called.

  The beautiful man chose precisely that time to slowly blink awake, then snap open his eyes. With a muffled sound, those slender-fingered hands came up to claw perfectly manicured nails to the hand on his mouth. Oren shushed him, but all he got for his troubles was a hard bite. He let a little whimper and his hold weakened just enough for the beautiful man to push his hand away and pull away, standing quickly but with difficulty. Oren reached up in a futile attempt to bring the other back down.

  Again, he was too late.

  The flashlight snapped back to them.

  The beautiful man covered his face from the light with an arm, stumbling back, swaying a little.

  “There!” came the call.

  Bang! Went the gun.

  The shot hit the beautiful, already wounded man on the arm, adding to his injuries. He fell back with a cry, grasping at the new wound, blood seeping through.

  Oren cursed and reached for the man, hauling him up once again, this time trying to get him to put an arm around him. Then he did what he did best: he ran. The beautiful man ran along as he could, half dragged by Oren.

  “Said wound, not kill... !” was the last Oren caught as they ran away.

  The men were already on their tails, and though they might prefer the beautiful stranger wounded and not killed, Oren was sure they would not extend the same to him. So he ran and dragged the man along with him, unable to slow down, moves completely on autopilot now. Through the dark building, up some stairs. The floor beneath them shifted and parts of the stairs crumbled, making the other gasp and lose his footing. Oren was fast enough in dragging him along that he didn’t fall... but the risk of them losing their footing was bigger the higher up they went.

  “Who-” the stranger panted.

  “Later,” Oren called. They encountered no one along the way in this rundown building, but the heavy steps and calls from the two men below them were heard still. Three flights up, Oren broke shoulder-first into an empty apartment, the rotten wooden door giving way easily, coming off what was left of its hinges. He went towards the bedroom where an old, dirty mattress and blankets laid abandoned. No doubt once it’d been the home of some joyrider. From the window, there was a plank laid between that building and the next. Oren climbed onto it, pulling the beautiful man along, and ran through it. He set the beautiful stranger against the wall for a moment and turned to push the wooden plank right off the building. It fell with a terrible noise.

  The beautiful stranger had slid down the wall to be sitting on the dirty floor, exhausted, pale.

  “What-” he’d started in a pant, but Oren shushed him and pulled him up again, an arm around him, running once more.

  “Later.” He promised again.

  They went up once more, for Oren was sure the pursuers would think they’d go down already. Up and to another similar passage through buildings. On the third building Oren left the plank up, not wanting to create a trail of noise to be followed by. They were coming to more inhabited areas of the city; he could tell for each new area they broke into was a little more patched up than the last: doors had been fixed with newer planks or changed for metal ones. More mattresses were scattered about. Old cloths hung as curtains.

  On the next room they passed, they encountered a few joyriders. Men and women who laid on those same type of old, stained mattresses they’d been seeing all around. Some were smoking, even then too out of it to mind them, ignoring the two runaways as they ignored the smell of rotten eggs from the drugs they smoked; others were out from some harder drugs – or from worse. The pungent scents of human decay permeated every room they were in.

  The beautiful man dragged behind Oren, slowing down from the assault to his senses, and slowing him down. Oren looked back at him, those pretty green eyes darted in every direction, seeming to have a hard time understanding what they were seeing. But they had no time to let the gorgeous man’s shock settle in. Oren pulled him along, walking past the joyriders and to another floor, barely letting the man he was dragging get a proper glimpse of the surroundings.

  Finally, unable to pull the other’s weight much farther, Oren sought an empty mattress and helped the beautiful man down on it.

  The man groaned in pain.

  “What-... what is going on?” He managed. For once, Oren didn’t shush him.

  “That what I wanna know!” Oren looked around for something that looked moderately clean... and found nothing. He cursed and turned back to the gorgeous man, kneeling by his side to look at the bullet wound.

  “Someone shot...?” he called in disbelief.

  “You in shock, I get it,” Oren pulled the man sideways, tugged at his arm despite the other’s gasp. No exit wound. And the wound was still bleeding. “Well fuck. Bad news buddy. We gotta get ya to a doc, yesterday.” He let go of his arm briefly and pulled on his black shirt, tearing a strip of fabric from it. He bunched it up and put some pressure on the bullet wound. “Hold this would ya?”

  The man held it with a shaky hand. “Shock...” he said softly, as if trying to regain a grip on reality. “Shock.”

  Oren frowned and patted the guy’s chest to get his attention, a bit worried at the way those eyes looked at him as if they were seeing nothing...

  “Listen. Buddy. Stay put, stay quiet. I’mma check ‘round a bit. Ok? Stay put, you gonna be okay. I’mma get ya to a doc soon.”

  “O-okay.”

  Oren got up again and hurried to the nearest set of stairs. He’d been running his e
ntire life, but his muscles had never felt as sore as they did right then. Still, no time for breaks. He took the steps two by two to retrace the way to the floor they’d come in through. He looked around. No one seemed to have followed from the window they’d climbed through. From another window in the same room he looked out onto the street; they weren’t close enough to the neon city lights to get good illumination, not that there was such a thing there, but the perpetual overcast day provided just enough light to see outside. He couldn’t see the men anywhere. Even activating the display in his eye with a blink, even switching to night vision. He could spot the crashed pod, but the other one – the larger pod – was now gone.

  Was it possible the men had given up pursuit? Who were they, anyway? Weren’t they from Sky City too? Oren’s gaze lifted to the clouds above, but there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary there. Why would they want another Sky City person hurt? Was it because Oren had meddled, or because of who this beautiful stranger was?

  Oren had a lot of questions, but no matter how long he stood there pondering, he wasn’t going to come to any answers on his own. Whoever they were, he didn’t have many choices: he could risk the streets, or he could wait and pray the cute man could hold off until they’d feel safe enough to leave their hideout. On the other hand, if they had gone, then there was a very real chance they’d come back looking for them, this time with backup.

  No, they couldn’t wait. He had to take the chance and get this guy to a doctor. He ran back up to where he’d left him, relieved to find that pretty face was still there, and still alive, though he couldn’t say he looked any better than earlier. His skin was still pale as death, and though he was putting some pressure on the wound, his gaze still seemed a little lost.

  He jumped a little when Oren came close enough to touch him.

  “Shh. Atta boy; now hold that tight.” Without warning, Oren hauled him back up. Despite the groan of pain, he started walking without giving the man time to accommodate.

  “Easy now...” Carefully, trying to take it a bit easier now, he took the man downstairs and all the way to ground level; then, down some dreary side streets until they reached a far more populated area. No one stopped them. No one looked at them twice, despite the beautiful man he was helping being clearly wounded and having a fashion sense vastly different from everyone else. Oren knew though, that just because they weren’t openly stared at didn’t mean they weren’t seen. Someone could just as quickly want nothing to do with them as they might sell the information to the first person who came asking, for as little as they were willing to pay. More often than not, though, they wouldn’t sell people off to anyone from the Sky City... in that, at least, almost everyone seemed to see eye to eye. Still, you could never be too safe, and so he tried to keep as low profile as he could possibly manage. He slunk through the streets with the increasingly weakening man at his side. “Just a bit further, buddy.”

  Just a bit further was a pink neon sign that read: Squealing Pig. The door beneath it was dark, dirty glass. It didn’t slide open, Oren had to pull it open and stumble into the brightly lit butchery. He’d always thought the doc had a sick sense of humor, putting her practice right behind such a place.

  The burly man at the counter brought the cleaver down so hard on the piece of meat, it stuck on the wooden board beneath it.

  “‘Can I do ya for, ‘Ren?” he asked, then seemed to finally take notice of the bleeding man he was dragging. His eyes looked up and down at the strangely clad man, but he merely snorted. “Hn. Gettin’ strays now, are we?” he pointed a thumb to the back. “Get movin’ then, ‘for it dirties m’floor.”

  “Thanks mate,” Oren went past the counters, through the freezer, and out the back door... straight into another room. One that looked more like a very, very questionable dentist office. A bored looking lady with long, black hair and wearing a white doctor’s coat sat at the dentist chair that made double-time as an operation table. Tablet in hand, she was swiping the pages of a digital magazine. She swiped two more before she looked up.

  “What’s this you bring today Oren?” she said with the air of someone who had all the time in the world.

  “This- whoa!” Oren caught the man as at last his legs gave way, tried to get him to stand straight once again, having to wrap both arms around him, now. “He bleedin’ out.”

  “I can see that,” she said, hopping off the chair to let Oren place the man there. “All over my carpet, too.”

  Instinctively, Oren looked down even though he knew the woman had no carpet there. He snorted and put the man down on the chair as carefully as he could manage. The stranger was not helping at all, and though he was still conscious, it seemed to be barely so. Still in shock, Oren surmised.

  “Manner of speech, darling,” the doctor chuckled, reaching for some scissors to cut off the sleeve of her patient’s jacket, then for her implements to see to the stranger’s wounds.

  The gorgeous man winced and tried his earlier questions again. “Who are...?”

  “Here, honey,” she took a breathing mask that was hanging on the side, placed it over the man’s nose and mouth, and cranked the valve of a tank under the chair briefly, until the man had inhaled enough anesthetic to be out cold.

  “There we go.” She went back to minding the wounds, by order of what was bleeding the most.

  Oren watched the frown on that pretty face ease away, finally able to take a proper look at the handsome features. Man, if this was a designer baby, they’d really done a good job. They’d maintained the best features of his ethnicity: the slanted, hooded eyes, which they’d contrasted by making bigger, with long lashes any woman was sure to envy. The oval face shape, culminating in a smaller chin, the angles of his jaw soft. The button nose made the perfect size and angle to compliment the rest of his face. A man’s face bordering on androgyny by the softening of some features.

  Busy observing that beauty, it was easy to forget that just a few inches away the doctor was removing a bullet, with utmost care. That was, until medical tweezers holding that bloody bullet were shoved in front of his face.

  Oren frowned. “Wha’?”

  “The tray, please,” she said, motioning with her chin to a metal tray on a desk behind him. Oren brought it under the tweezers. The bullet clinked as it was dropped, and she resumed her work cleaning and patching up the wound.

  “He gonna make it?” Oren asked, the frown not leaving his features. It’d be a shame if such pretty thing didn’t make it. Would have been a shame if he weren’t pretty too, of course, but that made it just all the sadder to think of.

  “Of course he will. How unskilled do you think I am?” She lifted her gaze briefly at such a question, then let it fall back on her handywork. “Where did you find this lost kitten? Doesn’t look like he belongs here.”

  Oren hesitated, but he wasn’t in the habit of lying to the doc. In fact, if there was one person he could trust fully there, that would be her. “Ya didn’ hear ‘bout the crash?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, I heard about the crash. Everyone heard about the crash.”

  Of course, he shouldn’t really have wondered such a thing – rumors there traveled faster than any runner did. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, he was in the pod that crash’ down.”

  “Hmm,” She rose a brow, but didn’t look up again. As soon as she had the most pressing wound closed, she spared a hand to pull a metallic arm attached to the chair; at the top it had a large, bright light. Flicking a switch on the side of the light’s base, the color changed from a cold white to black light. She turned the man’s head to the side and pulled the dark hair out of the way. Oren peered over her shoulder. The black light revealed a barcode on his neck that would have been impossible to see under normal lighting. She shoved the light away; it missed Oren’s head by an inch, and only because he was quick enough to jump back.

  “Yo!” He complained, glaring.

  “As I thought. He’s a designer baby.”

&
nbsp; Oren’s frown turned to a triumphant smirk. “I knew it!” He sounded like he’d just won a bet. His smile faded quickly enough at her next words, though.

  “You’re paying for him, darling?” She asked as she went back to work on the rest of the wounds, scrapes and bruises, mostly. She pressed a chip-like item to his temple to run a scan, then undid the jacket to check for more wounds, using those scissors to cut the man’s shirt open.

  Oren’s gaze fell on that bared chest, on the slender frame and the model-like muscles, but his lips pursed at her words. “What? Ya don’t work outta the kindness of your heart?”

  She laughed softly. “Kindness doesn’t fill the stomach, only the heart.”

  Oren gave an exaggerated sigh. Of course he knew he’d have to pay for treatment, but maybe the guy would pay him back. He owed him, after all, right? He’d saved his life!

  “Fine, fine,” he tried, “I’ll make ya an unpaid run, how’s that? But if there’s a reward for ‘im ya ain’t getting none.” His gaze lingered again on the gorgeous face, and that lovely body. It was only too bad he couldn’t see those vibrant pretty eyes once again... “You sure he gon’ be okay?”

  She pulled the chip from his temple and placed it back on its plastic cradle, a holographic screen above it coming on and giving her the readouts of her tests. “He’ll be just fine. No major damage, just a concussion. Some rest and plenty of drugs for the bullet wound and he’ll be on his feet in no time. It’s what he was built for: endurance and beauty.” She eyed him in turn. “What about you?”

  “Wha’ ‘bout me?” Oren asked. “Ya sayin’ I ain’t pretty or somethin’?”

  “Pretty as a brick wall, darling,” She chuckled and pulled a chair over, motioning him to it. “Now sit.”

  “I ain’t the one who got shot, doc.” Oren complained.

  “Sit,” she commanded.

  Oren sighed and plopped down on that chair.

  She tilted his head up, keeping a grip on his chin, and brought a pen light to his enhanced eye. The pupil contracted sharply, and Oren jerked his head back – or at least tried to. Her grip on his chin was stronger than he’d expected.