Unfiction

by Gene Doucette

  She shot him an aggravated look.

  “We have a lot to do,” she said, again, and then the light changed and they were walking again.

  Oliver turned to Wilson. “Look,” he said, “I know I agreed to go along, but this is getting weird.”

  I thought this was supposed to be fun, was what he thought but elected not to add.

  “A couple of things came up since we invited you,” Wilson said. “It’s gotten more complicated.”

  “All right, but I mean, I don’t need to go. I don’t want to mess up your plans.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Oliver’s familiarity with the urban sprawl of the city didn’t extend much beyond the businesses and high-value residences that existed on the main thoroughfares, which radiated outward from the center of town. He knew that at any given time, on any one of those streets, he was only an extra turn or two away from entire neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were a complex assortment of row houses, dormitories, fast food joints, liquor stores, and so on. He’d just never been in any of those neighborhoods.

  So when Minnie took them past his mental map of the city, it was like he’d entered a new realm entirely; like a two-dimensional Flatland resident discovering ‘up’, maybe, or an astronaut coming across a parallel dimension.

  Oliver wanted to ask where they were, and what they were doing there, but at this point it didn’t seem like there was any good to come from such questions. Minerva was acting with the kind of single-mindedness one usually only saw in someone trying to deliver a kidney across town, and Wilson would only tell him to be patient and wait for things to start making sense, as they would soon, surely. Oliver was about ready to excuse himself entirely from the situation and go home, but he couldn’t figure out how to do that politely, so he just kept on walking.

  “Here we are,” Minerva said.

  The street they were on was called Mudd Lane, and it was two hard rights and a diagonal left from Dot Ave., the last street Oliver recognized. Each block brought slightly more dilapidated properties. It was as if distance from a central road could be measured in paint flecks and broken windows per square foot.

  Minerva came to a stop about halfway down—literally down, as the street was built on a downhill slope. The buildings were three-story apartment houses in various shades of peeling brown and gray. Each one had a tiny yard behind a chain-link fence, with the lawn just large enough to give a dog a place to go and to raise the property values a tiny bit.

  The latch on the fence gate she stopped at was a bent metal clothes hanger, crafted into a loop and significantly rusted. She lifted it, and pushed the gate open.

  Once through the gate, they went up to the wooden porch. Minnie rang the doorbell for the top floor. The name on the mailbox was B J CODEKS. Oliver had never heard of anyone by that name, but that was not a surprise at this point.

  Nobody answered the bell, so she rang again, and looked up and down the street expectantly. Ollie realized how quiet it had gotten, or maybe it was always this quiet on these residential side streets in the middle of the afternoon. They’d gone from high pedestrian traffic to none whatsoever, on a road with no on-street parking and lots of residents who were either all out for the day or were hiding indoors. It didn’t feel temporarily unoccupied to him, though; it felt abandoned.

  A man answered the second ring.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, through the intercom.

  “It’s us, Ben,” Minerva said.

  “He’s here?”

  “Buzz us in, Ben.”

  Ben didn’t answer. Minnie looked at Wilson.

  “Maybe you should go around back,” she said. “Just in case.”

  “Good idea.”

  Wilson headed down the three steps from the porch and disappeared around the corner of the row house.

  “Why is that a good idea?” Oliver asked. He had a dozen questions, but that was a good one to start with, he thought.

  “In case Ben tries to go out that way,” Minnie said, in a tone suggesting he should have thought of this himself.

  Then the door buzzed, and the front door unlocked. A few seconds later, they were climbing a narrow, creaky wood staircase up to the third floor landing. The door to the apartment was ajar.

  Minnie stared at it for a few seconds before pushing it open, slowly. Like everything else in the place, it creaked.

  “Ben?” she called out.

  “Back here.”

  The apartment layout was simple enough: a main entryway with a living room/dining room on the left and doors to what were probably bedrooms on the right. The voice came from neither of those places, but straight ahead and slightly left. That was the direction of the kitchen.

  Ben was an old man. Oliver had no real expectations about who they were going to see, but even then, old man wasn’t one of them. He was a square-set, shortish guy with hair going blond-to-white and losing to a receding hairline. He looked like someone who used to be athletic, but that athleticism took place in black-and-white. He did not look like someone who went to a nightclub.

  Ollie was expecting to run into another person in an exotic costume. What he got was someone who looked like he was late for dialysis.

  He was eating a turkey sandwich at his kitchen counter. They had evidently interrupted an early dinner.

  “Is this him?” Ben asked, adding, “Where’s the other one?”

  “Wilson’s around back,” Minnie said.

  “Hah! You thought I was gonna rabbit on you.”

  “It crossed my mind, yes.”

  “Well, girlie, it crossed my mind too. I don’t like how this story ends.”

  “I understand.”

  I don’t, Oliver thought.

  “Let me get my things,” he said. He put down the other half of the turkey sandwich and disappeared into another room.

  “Is he coming?” Oliver asked.

  “We can’t get into Pallas without his help.”

  “So he’s coming.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I thought you guys had been to this club before?”

  “We’ve been to it. We’ve never made it in.”

  “So, he’s getting us a VIP pass or something?”

  “Sort of. He’s taking a long time.”

  She exited the room before Oliver had a chance to get another question in, like why an old man living in a crappy neighborhood in a crappy part of town had VIP passes to the hottest place in the city.

  Instead, he stood alone for a few minutes, staring at the turkey sandwich and wondering if he should let Wilson in through the back door, which was in the far corner of the kitchen. He decided not to, because maybe he wasn’t supposed to do anything at all. That was the consistent message he’d been getting to this point: go along for the ride, don’t ask questions, don’t do anything else, it will all make sense later.

  What he kind of wanted to do was have a bite of the sandwich. He wasn’t hungry, and it was the plainest sandwich he’d probably ever seen—white bread, one slice of turkey, perhaps some mayonnaise but it was hard to tell—yet he was filled with the weird urge to find out how it tasted.

  “Ollie,” Minerva called from the front room.

  “Are we ready?” he asked.

  He left the kitchen and headed for the front door, where Ben and Minnie were already waiting.

  Or, they were doing something other than waiting. It was true that they couldn’t proceed without him showing up, but the nature of the dynamic was very different than anticipated.

  More specifically, Ben had a gun in his hand, and he was pointing the gun at Minnie’s head.

  “What’s going on?” Oliver asked, his voice coming in a little higher than he wanted it to. He remembered the lesson he’d learned in the coffee shop about speaking in a lower vocal register to sound confident, and wondered if that worked in hostage situations too.

  “Is that real?” he asked.

  “Sure it’s real,” Ben said. “Now y
ou two are gonna drive me out of here. And don’t do anything funny.”

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Twas Brillig

  “Don’t do anything funny?” Minnie repeated. “That’s what you’re going with?”

  “I’m ad-libbing here,” Ben said.

  “Minnie,” Oliver said, “Maybe don’t heckle the guy with the gun.”

  “I know, but it’s just so cliché. You know that.”

  Ben pressed the gun against the back of her head. He wasn’t exactly holding her by the neck or anything, he just had the gun out, while she stood a foot in front of him with her arms raised.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” the old man said. “I’m on the clock here.”

  Oliver laughed.

  “Oh, this is, like, part of your cosplay thing, isn’t it?” he said to Minnie.

  In response, Ben fired the gun into the ceiling. This deafened everyone for a few seconds and showered Minerva and Ben in plaster.

  “Jesus, Ben,” Minerva said.

  Ben looked at Oliver, who was no longer laughing.

  “Real gun, real hostage situation, son,” he said. “Now let’s get moving.”

  “But we walked here,” Oliver said.

  “What’s your point?”

  “You said we had to drive you out of here. I mean, it’s not like there’s even anyone holding you in this place, you don’t need our help, but even if you did we walked. We didn’t drive.”

  Ben used his free hand to dig a set of keys from his pocket. He tossed them to Ollie.

  “I got something around back we can use. Let’s go.”

  They went around the same side of the building Wilson was last seen negotiating, so Oliver fully expected to run into him, resulting in some manner of comic or tragic turn of events, depending on how he reacted to the gun. But Wilson wasn’t there, not even on the back porch where one might expect to find someone who was supposed to be covering the rear exit.

  What was there, under a tarp in the only parking space the apartment building had, was a box truck. It looked a little like an old ambulance, one that had been retired a long time ago.

  That was exactly what it was. It even had the dome lights. They were covered in a layer of dust, but they were up there.

  “I’m gonna go ‘round the back with the lady, while you get behind the wheel. You know how to drive?”

  “Yes. Never driven anything this big before though.”

  It had been years since Oliver’d driven anything of any size, and never before in the city, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t matter. He’d still end up behind the wheel.

  “It handles like a big car, just use the mirrors.”

  Ben walked Minerva into the back doors and past the two crash carts still taking up space in the rear, then sat her down in the passenger seat. Oliver started the engine. It jumped to life immediately, which was a little surprising. The truck wouldn’t have been out of place in a junkyard.

  “All right, where am I going?” Oliver asked.

  “Don’t know for sure,” Ben said.

  “How can you not know? This was your idea.”

  “Only sort of. Here.”

  Ben handed a piece of paper over to Minerva, who examined it carefully. It looked to Oliver like a hand-drawn map, one with no clear orientation.

  “Not sure if I recognize this part of the city,” she said, holding it up for Oliver. “You?”

  There was a long oval-shaped road bisected—the long way—by a straight line, with shorter horizontal streets crossing the left and right parts of the oval.

  A large X was marked near the top of the lower left quadrant and a smaller check-mark in the far, upper right, on the outside of the oval’s curve.

  It was problematic for a great many reasons, one being that the X in the bottom half of the left side of the center line could just as easily be an X in the top half of the right side of the center line, because there was no telling which direction one was supposed to hold the map. It also had no scale to it. It didn’t even really look like a street map.

  “This looks like instructions for how to dissect a watermelon,” Oliver said.

  “You gotta go to the X,” Ben said, his gun still steady on Minerva.

  “Which one? There are two.”

  “The big one, champ.”

  “All right,” Oliver said. “But I’m going to point out again that we don’t know where the X is. And it sounds like you don’t either.”

  “It’s all I got.”

  “What’s at the X?”

  “Won’t know ‘til we get there.”

  “Just drive,” Minerva said. “Like, around. Just drive around. Maybe we’ll spot something he recognizes. Does that work, Ben?”

  “Sure, fine. Something I recognize.”

  Oliver put the ambulance in gear and wondered what he would do if they drove past a cop.

  None of this made even a little bit of sense. Minerva’s considerable calm while having a gun pointed at the back of her head left Ollie with the impression she was collaborating with Ben in some way, but he couldn’t see any angle where this would be to anybody’s advantage. The presence of a real, live firearm emphasized the point that if there was some kind of performance going on, it was a scary performance he wanted nothing to do with. It also raised the stakes. It was no longer a situation that was quirky and indie film weird. There were actual consequences. He didn’t know what most of those consequences probably were, but at least one of them involved somebody getting shot.

  It was simultaneously unreal, and too real. And, it was a lot more serious than pretending two army knapsacks didn’t exist, or prank calling his cell phone. Whatever Minerva was involved in, it was definitely not anything he wanted a part of.

  Oliver put the ambulance into gear and stepped on the gas. They jerked forward quickly, because he wasn’t quite used to the pedal’s sensitivity.

  “Hey,” Minerva said, over her shoulder. “Can you at least put the gun down? I don’t like the idea of losing my head because of your bad knees and his bad driving.”

  “Okay,” Ben said. Oliver couldn’t see him doing it, but he assumed he had.

  “You know I didn’t want to do this,” he added.

  “I know.”

  “Then why is he doing it?” Ollie asked her, under his breath.

  Minnie reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, rubbing it gently. It was about the only safe human contact they could engage in while sitting on opposite sides of the ambulance he happened to be navigating.

  “I can’t explain,” she said. “But thanks, you really came through.”

  He got the ambulance on the street and turned left, heading downhill and away from the center of town. He was putting fewer pedestrians at risk this way.

  “What was I supposed to do?” Ollie asked. “You were in danger, I couldn’t just—”

  “Leave? Run out the back door? Think maybe you could call the cops and have them rescue me?”

  “I couldn’t do that. What would that make me?”

  “It would make you Wilson, probably. That’s something he’d do.”

  He took his eyes off the road long enough to see if she was being serious.

  “Nah, come on, he wouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “Sure he would. Then he’d castigate me for being upset that he did the smart thing. Assuming I survived, I mean.”

  “Well. I think you’re worth the risk of getting shot. I can’t believe he wouldn’t feel the same way if he were in this situation.”

  Minerva gave him one of her really special smiles, and he nearly drove off the road.

  “You two are cute,” Ben said.

  “Thank you, scary kidnapper,” Oliver said.

  Minnie laughed, and blushed a little.

  They’d driven about three blocks. Oliver really didn’t know where he was or where he was going, and was not having any more luck pairing Ben’s odd map with any city designs lodged in his memory now that he was navigating.
So far, though, he hadn’t committed any acts of vehicular violence, so it was a net positive.

  “Hey, maybe it’s in one of the parks,” Ollie said.

  “That’s good thinking,” Minnie said. The city had a half-dozen open grassy areas, not including the ball field.

  “That oval could be a footpath. Where’s the nearest field? Am I going the right way?”

  Oliver narrowly missed a pedestrian who thought a yellow light was something he could be in the street for. The guy said something unkind as they passed, which he probably wouldn’t have done if they looked a little more like an ambulance. But, the white paint on the outside of the vehicle was more of a tan-and-rust color, and the signage had been painted over.

  “”I think so,” Minnie said. “Keep heading this way.”

  “All right. So, um, how’d you two meet?”

  “I volunteer at the elderly center sometimes.”

  “Do you? I didn’t know that.”

  “Gotta keep busy somehow. It’s good stuff. Makes me feel better as a person and all that. But anyway, Ben introduced himself and I realized he was going to be important today.”

  “I don’t understand that at all.”

  “Like I said, we never made it into Pallas before. When you meet a guy named Ben Kodeks, you figure he’s going to have something for you.”

  “Honestly, Minnie, you aren’t making any sense. Is there… is there like some kind of scavenger hunt involved? It’s just a club.”

  “It’s not just a club. And look, I was right. He gave us this map.”

  “To… something. We don’t know what.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  Traffic ahead of them was starting to show signs of congestion ahead. The taillights were coming on more frequently, and Oliver had to devote more time to braking. He was wondering about committing to another random turn to see if he could get away from it, but that would have required getting out of the lane he was in, and he had cars on both sides. So, he kept piloting them straight ahead, and hoped it would lead them to a park eventually.