by Jae Vogel
His tone was broken, same as his nose and his heart.
"I went to his family's restaurant, you know the one in the neighborhood where we met up with you?"
I nodded, and moved to the other side of his face.
"The shop was closed, during mid day, without any sign on the windows or nothing. It was like no one had ever been there in the first place. Fuckin' spooky."
Shivers went down my arm, and I stepped back to inspect my handiwork. A single spot of blood was still on the tip of his nose, but I shook my head, and decided it would have to stay exactly where it was. No use causing any more pain than I already had. One thing was sure, I was impressed with Rae's tolerance for pain; he didn't complain one bit.
"So how does that relate to the guys in the alley?" I asked, turning the hose on once more and wringing blood out into the street below.
"I was pushed out of the police station, and I was real messed up, so I went into the liquor store to buy some smokes, you know?"
I nodded and handed over the shirt. Rae looked at it distastefully, then threw it into the nearest garbage can.
"Fair enough.”
"Those guys were there,” he said, “in the alleyway after I had gotten out of the store. I was just leaning up on the wall, minding my own business, and they fuckin' profiled me, and started giving me shit about the way I was dressed."
"C'mon, let's keep moving."
"So, I'm already a bit pissed off that the cops are demonstrating total negligence fuck all, and then these fuckers start to harass me. I mean, my mouth got the better of me, and I might have provoked them a little."
I had to laugh. Nothing was ever as cut and try as it seemed. This was just one more reminder of the intense subjectivity surrounding every conflict I had ever witnessed.
"One of them shoved me against the wall, and you know how Hep is always goin' on about how we should be prepared to fight back against the oppressors, and whatnot. He gave me a knife."
Rae pulled out the knife that the man I had shot was about to use against him. Apparently, Rae had picked it up again before leaving. No doubt a result of his attachment to Hep, mixed with a bit of street-smart common sense.
"So I sliced open his ear. If you're going to fuck with people on the street, you should be prepared to be properly fucked with back, without mercy."
I nodded.
There was no way that those boys back there could have expected such a merciless assault from a faggot on the side of an alleyway. Hep had done well, and for some reason, we had managed to inflict more physical damage than a hand full of thugs out on the street for a pissing contest.
"So, what else do you know about Hep? I mean, how can you be certain that he hasn't just fucked off, like the police said."
"I've got something else. Something that the police don't know about yet. I kept it secret, because I wanted to know if the police were in on the project or not."
"God damnit."
"What?"
I shook my head, and bit my lip.
"Nothing, just tell me what your secret is."
"I'll have to show you."
We ended up going around the long way toward the neighborhood in the back of the family restaurant. I gave him my sweater, so he could at least have something to cover his upper body. I didn't need the two of us getting stopped because somebody's sensibilities were offended by the sight of Rae's torso.
Without much trouble, we managed to get over the wall and into the narrow alleyway which separated the two neighborhoods just up the gutter, away from Hep's Uncle's place. I wasn't in top condition by any means, and it took me longer than I care to admit just to pull myself up over the wall. Wounds in your shoulder and on the underside of your left ass cheek don't make for great wall scaling conditions.
Eventually, we got to the other side, and we walked silently between the houses.
I was grateful for the height of the two walls on either side of us. I felt secluded. Peaceful. There were no barking dogs to contend with, and no real sound except for the trickle of water underneath, and the sound of our own footsteps. The jasmine covered iron fence that was the physical barrier on the far end of the alley grew closer as we approached. Rae turned to me, and raised his finger to his mouth, informing me that I should shut the fuck up.
I nodded.
The finger extended from his mouth forward in space, clearly indicating that he would be right back. I wasn't particularly excited to climb another gate at the moment, so I leaned up against the nearest wall, and slouched down for a break.
As silently as you can leap over an iron gate, Rae navigated the obstacle without much of a problem. Curious, I peeked through the leaves of Jasmine to watch him on the other side. To my surprise, he didn't move. He simply stayed put, right along the far side of the garden, with both hands in the air. No words were spoken, and no effort was made from his part to announce his presence.
Another shadow approached.
The sound of leaves rustling underfoot was followed immediately by a little girl with a crossbow. I gasped, recognizing her from when she had lead me to the restaurant in the first place. Quick as a blink, she turned toward me, lined up her sights and fired. I slammed my body backward, so that my head actually backed into the wall behind me. The pain was sharp, but it was a hell of a lot less sharp than a three inch crossbow quarrel.
In the yard where Rae and the girl were, there were the brief sounds of struggle. The girl didn't cry out, which lead me to believe that she wasn't in any serious kind of danger. The sound was actually the most muted struggle I have ever heard.
I let out my breath and walked over to pick up the dart.
The missile had actually skipped along the ground, and had run more than half way up the incline toward the other street. By the time I got back to the iron gate, the little girl and Rae were sitting quietly together in the yard. The girl was in possession of her crossbow once more, and as far as I could tell, it was loaded once more.
I put the dart between my teeth and climbed up the iron fence, using the bars of the fence and the bricks of the nearby wall to leverage against one another. Feeling much like a pirate, I dropped from over the jasmine scented peak of the black iron fence. My eyes narrowed, and I walked over to the little girl. Squatting down on my knees, I took the bolt out from between my teeth and held it out to her, with the pointed end facing toward my own body.
She snatched it up quick, and then nodded her head in toward the bakery. We moved over to follow her, and she entered in the passcode for the back door. The three of us moved into the back area, and watched as the girl climbed up a ladder on the far side of the secluded office. Climbing over pieces of promotional gear, boxes of old shirts, and long ignored baking equipment, we found a small section of peace on the far side of the attic.
She broke off what I assume was the last of the stale bread, and offered the two of us a few slices of pastrami to eat. I accepted gratefully, and sat down to figure out what the hell was going on.
"They came, and I was hidden. I thought about doing something about it, but I knew my dad didn't want me to do anything. They were bald, and wore suites. They took Hep, and I'm pretty sure they were interested in you,” she said, and narrowed her eyes at me.
I realized that I wasn't entirely sure whether or not she would have been disappointed if her quarrel had hit its intended mark. The girl wasn't a killer; that much was for sure. Something awful had happened here. Something had taken this sweet girl and pushed her to the point where she hadn't hesitated long enough to consider the repercussions of her shot. That could have been anyone. She could have attacked some neighborhood kid, or something even worse.
I reached out to grab her by the shoulders, and give her a hug.
She was hesitant at first, but she came around soon enough afterward. Little warrior wasn't even a teenager, and for some reason, I knew she was right.
"I'm sorry."
I didn't know exactly where to go from that point. It was pretty
clear that I wasn't the one responsible for taking her family away. Both of us knew that much, but it was unfortunate as hell, and I had no trouble believing it was a retaliative effort against the events that had transpired over the last several weeks.
Whatever words of wisdom may have existed in my mind were gone. I didn't have anything for her that was certain, and the last thing I wanted to do was lie to her. Instead, I just gave her a shoulder to cry on, and sat with her while our stale bread and cured pastrami sat exposed to the air of the bakery attic.
Chapter 14
The girl was more of a pain in the ass than I initially gave her credit for — even after she nearly shot me.
It’s not like there were any explicit rules that were laid out for our little retreat at the bakery, but there were plenty of unspoken agreements that I was apparently supposed to keep abreast of. I don’t know how I was supposed to know, because nobody bothered telling me anything. Things like not turning on the stove when I wanted to make myself a cup of tea. Not only was there a hot tap around the back of the oven, but the stove was completely off limits.
“Any light at all,” she said, “and people will know that we are here. I don’t want to have to hide and run away again.”
The girl had a great point. I hadn’t thought that something as simple as a stove in the back of a kitchen would blow our cover. I couldn’t see the street from anywhere near the stove, but it was possible that someone might have seen the light of the fire from the skylights located behind the stove. Unlikely, but possible. I’ll give it to the girl, she was paranoid as hell, but would make an excellent fyi agent.
In addition to restricting my movements, and informing me of which bathrooms and refrigerators I could keep access to, and which ones I would have to abandon, she also did a fine job of interrogating me. She wanted to know everything about what I did with Hep, which was a real problem, considering that most of the shit that Hep and I did was not something you’d want to share with a twelve year old. Regardless, I tried to be at least somewhat transparent with the little chitlin. No need to get into all of the banal details, but I told her about how we had met, and how much time we spent with one another. She seemed authentically interested in getting to know her cousin better, which I have to say made me sad in more than one way.
First of all, the obvious pain was that someone had taken him away from her. At this point, there was no need to look at the information and conclude anything less. Someone just coming into the situation might have easily imagined that Hep was passed out in a gutter somewhere, or maybe even coked out of his mind in some mansion with his latest client. I suspected that neither of those two were true. Something terrible was going on here, and this girl was proof that things were not as they should be. Nobody should be forced to spend time away from their family without consent, especially not a twelve year old girl.
One positive thing about the whole experience was that the more real I got with her, the more she was inclined to reciprocate and actually share information with me. I learned that there are a number of times when she had seen the men come by over the last couple of days.
"They usually come by twice a day,” she said, “at least they have so far. I know that they are aware that I stayed behind, but so far I haven't actually done anything about it. I'm not going to call the cops, because I figure if the cops wanted to do anything about it, they would have shown up by now."
"Damn, kid, you sound just like your cousin."
"Well, sort of," Rae would interject, and then the conversation would get derailed between Rae and the kid, talking about whether or not Hep's theories would or would not contain various elements of anti-police sentimentality. The arguments were cute, but they got on my nerves more often than not. What really inspired me about the girl was that she seemed to have a lot of information about how the younger generation was adopting VR. She was really into it.
"Some friends of mine, they even go online using a headset, and everything else like that. You know, I would do that too, but my Dad thinks that new technology like that is something that I should really get more into when I'm an adult."
"And do you listen to what your dad thinks you should do?"
She shook her head.
"Not really. I just use chat systems regardless. It's pretty interesting, because it's like talking to ghosts. Nobody is really there, and yet you're having this complete conversation with them. I figure that's an awful lot like what the people are doing with VR, except that they are doing it with their eyes, instead of their words."
We talked more about the type of chats she enjoyed, and it came out that she really enjoyed working with survivalism, and that she had actually gone out and role-played with a couple of friends one time in real life, not just in a VR mod, like a lot of the other kids did.
"We all had our crossbows, and we had to duck down and avoid neighborhood people. Even had to hide from the cops once. There were three of us. I had a great time, but the other two kids, they actually spend most of their time in VR, so I don't actually hang out with them much. I tried telling my dad that I would be able to be more social if I was able to join in on the same types of activities that my friends were doing."
Initially, I felt compelled to tell her that not everything your friends are going to be doing throughout your life is going to be something that you should pursue. Then I decided to hold my tongue; that wasn't a door that I wanted to open in this conversation. Instead, I merely nodded and encouraged her with another course of thought.
"Well, at least you're a good shot with that thing. I doubt that your friends would be as accurate. They might have a lot of confidence in their ability to shoot crossbows, if they are practicing shooting crossbows in VR, but I think it takes something to put those skills into practice."
"You're right. My friends call that the mind getting in their way. Sort of like they already know how to do something, like tie your shoes, but the problem is unless you allow your brain to fill in the details without thinking, then it kind of messes you up, like you forget that you already know."
From the mouth of a child.
"That's an important thing to remember,” I said. “I think there are a ton of adults who still haven't figured that sort of thing out.”
These conversations, and many others went alongside them over the course of the next couple of days.
I'd like to think that my time spent there wasn't anything too terribly selfish, but some of it was simply the fact that I needed a space to heal, and somehow it seemed right to crash with Hep's cousin while we figured out how to move forward from that position, toward a situation where things would be all right again.
Rae lay low the whole time, and the girl was a natural leader between the three of us. She let each of us know everything we needed to about camping out in the restaurant, and everything she knew about the abduction of the family. She brought us to her snipe out location at the key moments when the car would show up. Each day they stopped by like clockwork, which was more than a bit disconcerting, though comforting in the same breath.
To me, their regularity meant that they were people who could be trusted to continue to operate within a bureaucratic mentality; in my experience, those were exactly the sort of people who could be manipulated simply by merit of their own receptivity to orders.
On the third morning of cold pastrami sandwiches, the three of us were underneath the crawl space of the house, waiting for that same car to make its morning rounds, when all of a sudden, I got an idea.
Chapter 15
I suppose my general operational theory could be boiled down to the following statement: when in doubt, fire the nearest weapon and see what happens.
I'd like to think that I was a bit more sophisticated with the whole thing, but to be perfectly honest, I was relatively new to the whole subterfuge thing, and I could have stood to use a few lessons from the kid. She seemed to be the only one of the three of us that had any sense at all.
"If you're t
hinking about shooting the car,” she said, matter-of-factly, “you'll only give away our position. Chances are that they have weapons that are more powerful than a crossbow, and I'm not sure that you want to go face to face with whatever they brought with them."
She talked like a gangster, or some world hardened traveler who knew the perils of the wilder world. I found myself wondering exactly how much television this kid had watched, or how vivid those games were that she and her friends enjoyed playing so much. My curiosity got the best of me and I found myself asking her outright.
"If this was one of the games that you and your friend played, and you wanted to get control of that car, what would you do?"
The question was simple, and the response was more direct than I had anticipated.
"Blow out a tire."
The idea of disabling the car had been far from my mind. The car was just sitting there, by the curb, practically begging to be shot at.
"Do you think you could hit the tire?"
The question was meaningless. We all knew she could hit the tire. Just as she had nearly planted a dart square in the center of my chest. The real question wasn't whether or not she could hit a tire, but whether or not we were ready to accept the responsibility of two armed men coming after her for putting out the tire to their car. But she didn't have to explain any of this to me. I caught on all by myself. The non-verbal cues of this woman-to-be were incredible. I pitied any of the men in her future, stupid enough to stand in her way.
"You fire from here, and Rae and I will take them from the sides?"
She weighted her position on this new tack, wondering, no doubt if she would be able to flee in the event that both of us were shot. In the end, she conceded. There was no way for me to do anything but accept her terms, as I couldn't think of a better way for this to all go down. What's more is I needed her to kill that tire if I wanted to strand them, which meant that I had to do what she asked of me.
