by T. D. Fox
The man stepped forward, scooped the entire pile into one large hand, retrieved his drink and slipped something into the tip jar.
With a flourish of his long gray coat, he turned—sending a spray of rain water across the customers standing nearby. People gasped and swore. The man still scowling near the old woman got the worst of it; he skittered back with an offended cry. The ragged woman looked up, eyes gleaming. Her leathered cheeks folded into a gap-toothed smile. She dropped her chin and resumed stomping in the puddles of water.
Courtney smiled without thinking. The man was halfway out the door by now, but she looked up to see him glancing back. Pale eyes grazed hers, and the corner of his mouth turned up. Then he disappeared into the sheets of rain.
“Sorry, everyone, we’ll clean that up,” Max announced. With a sigh, he started for the mop closet, then paused. He reached past Courtney for the tip jar.
“Uh, Court...” He tipped it toward her so she could see inside. “I knew I saw something funny.”
There, gleaming atop the meager ring of quarters and dimes, sat a folded switchblade.
⬥◆⬥
Courtney walked with her hood pulled low, hands in her pockets, her stride sure and swift on the way back to her apartment. Closing shift ended at ten. Max would’ve tried to walk her home, but she’d ducked out too fast for him to offer.
Technically, curfew started at eleven. Not that the police could enforce it. Still, Orion’s streets were never a good place to be after a sundown. For the hundredth time, she wished for a car. But she knew better. People could get away with stuff like that in Eastside, but here? Owning something as luxurious as a car would paint a big fat target on her back. The only vehicles parked along the street near her café belonged to the business-class clientele, who stopped by Jessie’s Joe when their high-end cafés ran out of coffee rations before the next shipment. They never stayed long. The risk of a car burglary on Westside was a steep price to pay for a coffee habit. Oh, well. With her paycheck, it wasn’t like Courtney could afford the upkeep of the ancient models available in Orion City anyway. And transit fare added up. So, despite the cautionary tales drifting around Westside, she usually relied on her own two feet.
A sharp wind hissed up the street. Shivering, she shoved her hands deeper into her pockets. At least the rain had cleared. The Wall rose like a black horizon against the glittering sky. Cloudless nights were rare this late in October. Stars burned defiantly through the wash of city lights. She’d heard stories, from people who traveled outside the city before Quarantine, that there were actually thousands of stars visible up there on clear nights in the countryside. Personally she couldn’t remember ever leaving Orion. She knew she had, as a child, before the Wall went up. But no memories had stuck.
Ugh. Here she was, thinking about it again: that big, black Nothing against the spray of stars. Courtney refused to look at it. If she pretended her peripherals didn’t exist, she could imagine the night sky went on and on. Unscathed by city lights. Unending, unconfined. Infinite.
She’d thrown a remote at the TV last night. Of course, as soon as the cracked smudge of pixels bloomed into a permanent scar behind the screen, she’d regretted it a little. But only a little. The mayor’s pudgy pink face filled her mind, his yearly spiel full of fluffy promises. She hated him, yet every time his “updates” came on she couldn’t bring herself to change the channel. The scientists who’d sacrificed their freedom to join the victims of Quarantine had nearly developed a cure. Soon, the Wall would come down, and the citizens of Orion would join the outside world at last. Etcetera, etcetera.
Victims. An unfair word, since most of the citizens inside the Wall hadn’t been affected by the virus.
Except there was no way to prove that. Not when it struck so suddenly. Not when there was no way of telling who could be next.
A shadow moved ahead. Courtney froze. Squinting her eyes, she focused past the harsh glare of a street light on the wet pavement—at the shape moving in the dark just beyond.
Her breath snagged.
A dog. Big, black, and moving toward her, having rounded the corner of a building up ahead. She could hear its ragged panting from where she stood. The harsh scraping sound sent ice spearing through her veins. Fast and quiet, she plunged her hands into her purse. Her fingers closed around the can of pepper spray she kept there.
“Sammy!”
A voice cut through the dark ahead, pinched with annoyance.
“Come on, boy. Why can’t you do your business before curfew? Get on with it.”
A man jogged around the corner. Courtney’s frozen blood thawed. He held the end of a leash, catching up to the dog in the street. She let go of the pepper spray.
The dog trotted up to the light pole and sniffed at the base. Lifting its leg, it stuck its nose in the air and let loose a stream of steaming yellow. The man tapped his foot behind him.
“All right, all right, let’s go.”
He tugged on the leash. The dog lolled its tongue and flopped its tail, following him back around the corner and out of sight.
Courtney watched them go. Her pulse slowed. A dog. Just a regular dog. With a collar, a leash, attached to a human. She forced herself to begin walking again.
That was another reason she was glad to live in Westside. Even with all its crime, tatty rundown buildings, and poor plumbing, at least here a dog was just a dog.
In Eastside she might not have been so lucky.
2. THE LABEL
“DADDY, I WANT to be a doctor when I grow up.”
“Listen to her, Melody. She’s taking after you. That’s years and years of school, Court. And who’s paying for that, huh?”
Warm copper hair, sunlight caught in a smile, flashed by as gentle hands pushed the swing.
“Can I, Mom?” Wind tugged at Courtney’s braids. “Can I be a doctor?”
“You can be whatever you want to be, love.”
“I want to be someone who helps people. Like you.”
“Oh, baby,” she laughed. The chains tinkled and squeaked with it. “You don’t want to be a lawyer. You’ve got more potential than me. More potential than this city. Go somewhere else.” She pushed her higher. “Somewhere bigger!”
SLAM.
The scene shifted. A door shuddered on its hinges, tinkling rust-colored glass littered over the threshold.
“Go away, Court,” came the muffled slur. “She’s not coming back.”
Cold, stinging feet. Wailing wind outside, not quite drowning out the sirens. Avoiding the broken bottle, Courtney tiptoed closer.
“Dad.” Her throat squeezed. “Let me help. I’ll get a broom—”
“No!” The explosive bellow rocked her back on her heels. Glass pricked the sole of her foot. “You can’t help. No one can.” A snorting, rasping sob. “Go to your room.”
A siren screeched, closer, making her jump. Her heart thumped, but a sniff from across the apartment stole her focus. Heel throbbing, Courtney padded on her toes into her brother’s room. Past the empty bed to the blanket fort, where the toddler sat holding his ears, silent, big brown eyes wide in the dark.
“Room for me?” she whispered.
No tears in her own throat. Her brother, however, crumpled as soon as she knelt. He burrowed into her arms, sobs shaking his little frame.
She held him.
She held him, ignoring the sharp wet sting in her foot, and kept her dry eyes open as long as the sirens lasted—until the radio alarm clicked on with the sun’s first rays.
“Cloudy skies again this week, with a storm warning by the weekend. More disturbances on Fifth and Stewart, where witnesses have reported another vigilante sighting, the fourth this month in a series of...”
Squeezing her eyelids shut, Courtney rolled over and stretched an arm out toward the radio alarm clock. Her searching fingers bumped it straight off the bedside table to the carpet. With a groan, she buried her face in the pillow, taking a few deep breaths.
It had been a long t
ime since she’d dreamed about... her.
On a final inhale, Courtney heaved herself out of bed, rubbed her eyes and strode into the bathroom. One glance in the mirror made her wince. She’d been running on four hours of sleep since Wednesday, and she looked it. Her coppery blonde hair hung in a tangled mess over one shoulder, bits and pieces of it flaring out around her round face. Her skin looked paler than normal, wispy circles of shadow under her dark brown eyes. She leaned forward and pinched at her cheek. A tiny rose of color bloomed, then faded. Blush today. And mascara. And something to cover up those bags.
She should really stop taking the closing shifts. It was Friday night, for crying out loud. Dina had been begging her to go out and rinse the approaching winter blues away under a tidal wave of tequila. Nothing a little alcohol, neon lights and dancing couldn’t cure.
Except claustrophobia.
Her excuses were getting thinner. Work devoured her days; once the only thing keeping her sane, now it felt like a drug she’d grown too much tolerance for. One more night shift, one more dark walk home to an empty apartment, might just drive her crazy.
She brushed out her hair as best she could, then slung it into a side braid. Dab of makeup here, bobby pin there. Pulling on a pair of jeans and her favorite sunflower-yellow peacoat, she checked her reflection one last time in the mirror. Eye bags mostly hidden, she looked halfway normal.
Her phone buzzed on the bathroom counter. Text rolled across the top of her screen: an emergency alert: VIGILANTE DISTURBANCE ON SIXTH STREET. CASUALTIES UNKNOWN. ROAD CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
So her route to work wouldn’t be blocked. Courtney returned her gaze to the mirror. Her usual route was rarely affected, as she took a back alley. Less than ideal, but it beat the stress of not knowing whether she’d make it to work on time with all the delays they caused on a weekly basis. Who would grace the headlines this time, she wondered. The Orion Giant? The Bird-Man? She’d lost track. Michael ate up every detail of these stories, toting his controversial comics around everywhere she saw him. Too bad she’d long outgrown that kind of enthusiasm. The interruptions to her morning commute stoked neither fear nor excitement, only a weary irritation.
Courtney glanced at the clock. A sigh pulled the height out of her shoulders—not that she had much to begin with—and she made her way to the kitchen to scope out a late breakfast to kill the twenty minutes she had before leaving.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Tensed, she retrieved it. But it was just a text from Dina.
Hey lady. You free?
With a faint smile, Courtney opened her messages. Sorry, I’m closing tonight.
Two seconds before the next buzz. Again? :(
Then... It’s FRIDAY.
Jess put me on the schedule, Courtney typed back. What about tomorrow? I don’t think I’m taking any shifts.
Buzz. I’m kidnapping you if you do.
Feeling slightly less alone in the quiet apartment with her best friend vibrating in her phone, Courtney headed for the refrigerator.
Four years should’ve gotten her accustomed to living by herself. At twenty-one, she should at least find it normal now, even easy. But the thick, ominous shadow of the Wall touched the view from every window in her apartment. It made everything feel smaller. Lonelier.
She missed Michael. He’d be getting home from school soon; maybe she could call him on her way to work. But her little brother didn’t have his own cell yet, and she didn’t want to risk calling home in case their father answered. Maybe she’d drop by tomorrow after Conrad left for work. His Saturday shifts working security down the street made that convenient; she could observe his schedule from a distance, and plan her shifts at the café so she’d conveniently miss him whenever he dropped by for a visit.
Throat squeezing at the unwelcome nudge of guilt, she grabbed a yogurt from the fridge, tugged a spoon off the mountain of clean dishes she had yet to put away, and padded to the living room to at least fill the place with sound for twenty minutes.
The TV snapped on to the same talk show she’d angrily turned off last night. Pausing before she switched the channel, Courtney smirked at the headline rolling across the screen beneath the two talking heads.
ARE CHANGERS REAL? New exposé asks the important questions, read the ticker at the bottom of the screen.
Maybe a little morning entertainment wouldn’t hurt. Stupidity could be funny, at least. The few times it didn’t make her want to throw the remote.
“I’m serious, Pat,” laughed the first of the three hosts sitting at the rounded desk. “It’s been ten years, and it seems some people still haven’t figured out which way is up.”
“Well, you’ve got to look at it from the point of view of the typical Westside demographic,” the silver-haired bowtie-wearing suit called Pat replied. “I mean, let’s face it: that’s where most of these rumors are circulating from. When you’re uneducated, poor, maybe a little down on your luck, you start leaning into superstition to explain the stuff that makes life feel out of control. Sorry if that sounds insensitive, Kim, but it’s the reality.”
Courtney ground her teeth, while the first speaker—Kim—laughed again.
“What about the rumors coming from Chinatown?” piped up the third, a young woman with flashing dark eyes and a straight-backed posture. A guest host—and a green one, by the indignant look on her face. “You can’t just pin these rumors on urban legends spread by a desperate, lower class population when they appear in wealthy communities too.”
The two elder hosts looked at her, then at each other, and exchanged a smirk.
“The Triads in Eastside have their own reasons for circulating rumors,” Pat said with a sweep of his arm. “And not all of Chinatown is wealthy. I don’t doubt poor folk there are only too eager to claim the Orion Giant as one of their own; we know he targets the gangs in Chinatown more than any other criminal organization in the city.”
“Now there’s a rumor,” Kim sang. “A masked vigilante who can change his size at will, hopping rooftops to chase down criminals and handing them off like party favors to the police? I think a fan of T.K. Wang’s comic books took things way too far. Or perhaps T.K. Wang himself hired a stuntman to increase his book sales.”
“The only rumor I’d bother spreading,” Pat chortled. “Honestly, I can’t believe he’s gotten such a fan base. The Orion Giant’s popularity just goes to show how desperate this city is for some kind of magical, heroic answer to sweep away our very real, scientifically-based problems.”
“Scientific?” the new girl spoke up again. “What’s scientific about ignoring the evidence in front of your face? Of course Changers are real. We’ve had years of documented sightings—”
“Documented,” Pat laughed. “If you mean ten-second internet videos and trolls looking for attention, sure, we’ve got great evidence. Now give me one level-headed person that believes them.”
The young woman bristled. “How would you explain Freak Week then?”
Courtney perked up on the couch. Now this was interesting. No talk-show host she knew of had ever mentioned that infamous first week of Quarantine. The week a sudden, inexplicable rash of deaths swept the city, sparking panic so intense the National Guard had been sent in to control the riots and terror dissolving Orion’s streets.
The week the Wall went up—first in a towering cordon of barbed wire and stacked metal freight crating, then steadily reinforced with concrete as the months passed and the quarantine refused to resolve. Courtney remembered listening to her elementary history teacher describe the Berlin wall: appeared in a day, then lasted thirty years. If only she’d known then how very soon she’d find herself living a history lesson. Although the death reports were now few and far between, the Wall remained up, and the outside world knew little of what was going on behind it. Orion might have access to the rest of the country’s news, but that channel of communication went one way. Couldn’t really call it communication, though, when AITO was the only organization allowed to
actually speak to the Outside. After the horrors of Freak Week, they claimed the media silence prevented panic from infecting the rest of the nation.
The chilly notes of her dream trickled back. Courtney turned up the volume on the TV.
Onscreen, Kim tensed. Her eyes dropped to the reporting desk with a visible curl of her shoulders, while Pat straightened with a sharp laugh.
“Freak Week?” he echoed. “Way to keep it light, Tanya. Do you really want to drag all our viewers back to places we’d rather forget?”
“Speak for yourself, not the viewers,” Tanya shot back. Courtney decided she liked her. “Look, I worked my butt off to get on here because I’m sick of watching you both play along with the ridiculous garbage they’re feeding us, and watch you feed it to them.” She hurled a hand toward the camera, which had tightened in on her. “Ten years, Pat. Does that bullshit even taste bad anymore?”
The tension crackling through the TV made it impossible to press the channel button. Courtney lowered the remote, settling into the couch, breakfast forgotten.
“Heh, alright, let’s dial this back a tad,” Pat said, while Kim made eye contact with someone off camera, her lips pressed. “The topic sent in this morning was: are Changers real? Table the jokes! You wanna get serious, I’m all for it. Let’s tell people what they really wanna know. What do you want to hear in answer to that question?”
“Not want to hear,” Tanya interrupted. “The answer isn’t—”
“Isn’t fun,” Pat said. “Isn’t flashy or cool or, God help us, supernatural. There’s not something deeper going on, Tanya. It just sucks. People dying sucks. Quarantine sucks. Making up stories about what really happens inside the madness of it all won’t help anyone process the horror of what we all went through.”
“I think it’s about time for our commercial break, Pat,” Kim said, voice stiffly light.
“Hang on, viewers like this stuff.” Pat reached a hand out. “But I gotta ask you, kiddo, how old were you during Freak Week? Ten? Fifteen? Do you remember what happened, were you thinking clearly?” He laughed. “I sure wasn’t! We were all freaked out about a fat concrete wall going up around our home, riots on the streets and martial law keeping everyone from complete anarchy. The panic after three thousand deaths in one week is enough to make anyone see stuff. And half the people who gave ‘eyewitness accounts’ that week were probably infected by the virus anyway. Crazy is a side effect, we all know that now.”
