by D. J. Molles
Getty moved to a call board. Its projection flickered, but was still active. That was lucky. All the lights were out, but apparently that was by choice—the building still had power. Getty tapped one of the apartment registers twice with his finger.
In blue, glowing letters that cast a cold hue to the vestibule, Walter read that the apartment was registered to a Mr. and Mrs. Furr.
No one that he knew.
There was intimate silence for a moment.
Muted explosions rumbled the ground underneath them.
A speaker on the wall made the tiniest pop, almost polite, and then there was the very slight hiss of an open line, but no one spoke through it.
Getty stared at the register, as though it was staring back. “It’s Getty,” he said quietly. “Four-by-four.” There was a pause. He frowned at the register. “What about you?”
Silence.
Open line.
Getty shifted, glanced at the way out.
Then a man’s voice: “Ayuh, Carolina blue. Come on.”
The door to the stairs and the elevator made a light, electronic unlatching sound, and Getty pulled it open and limped through, Walter in tow.
Walt remembered Virgil saying “four-by-four” when he’d brought them to the other house, the one where Tria had been operating out of. Had that been considered a safe house? It hadn’t been so safe in the end. Now it was a pile of cinder and splinters.
He supposed “four-by-four” was some sort of safe-word. “Carolina blue,” apparently a good response.
Getty didn’t take the elevator. Walter wondered if it was a tactical consideration, or if Getty was just a glutton for punishment, and had to conclude there must be a reason for it. The explosions were still going off out there. The power grid was going down in certain areas. The last thing they wanted was to be stuck on an elevator.
They ascended two flights of stairs to the top floor.
Out of the stairwell, they walked into a dimly-lit hallway. The doors were evenly spaced and numbered and lettered. They were on the third floor. All the doors began with the numeral 3, and then on down the alphabet.
There was nothing special about it. It looked very institutional. Almost like a dormitory. SoDro only needed to house their workers. They didn’t need to surround them with aesthetic appeal.
They walked through this drab but spacious tunnel. Walter heard voices that sounded like a newscast coming from behind one of the doors. Perhaps that apartment was still occupied. Or the resident had left the TV on when they’d fled. Otherwise, there was no sign of life.
Still, Walter couldn’t help looking behind them guiltily as they made their way down the hall. Expecting someone to be watching them, these two men battered and dusty and bleeding, lugging half-empty battlerifles along with them.
They weren’t CoAx, that was for damn sure. No one would make that mistake.
If they were seen it would simply come down to that person’s political leanings.
Maybe Walter would have to shoot that person.
He didn’t think it was so far outside of the realm of possibility.
Things had changed a great deal, and quite literally overnight.
The hall ended. Before them stood a door, right smack dab in the center of the wall.
3-K
It was a third floor end unit. As private as an apartment could be.
Getty didn’t even knock. They were stepping up to the door when the sound of latches being flung open rattled from inside and then the door was yanked wide, and Getty took a half second to look at the man that stood there, and then he went in and Walter followed.
The apartment was dark.
The door closed behind them. Slammed, actually.
Walter wanted to feel safe, he wanted to feel suddenly relaxed, but he didn’t. He kept remembering running out of Tria’s safehouse. Kept remembering the mini bombs hitting that structure only seconds later and deconstructing it into its jumbled molecular parts.
There were no furnishings here. A familiar theme. Straight ahead was a room that Walter supposed was the living area, and there was a large window. Next to this window was a folding table. On the table was a long, mean-looking rifle with a bulging protuberance of an optic on top. Behind the rifle was a woman.
Walter recognized her from the safehouse where they’d held Captain Kuai Luo. Then, she’d been dirty and face-paint smeared. Now, she was cleaned, and she was wearing normal clothes.
She turned to look at the newcomers, and she fixed Walter momentarily with those placid eyes of hers that Walter remembered so well.
She was…what was the right word for it?
Prim.
Yes. Prim.
The security latches on the apartment door went clacking back into place. Walter turned and looked at the one doing the clacking. It was the man with the rat-face. The one that had stood next to the woman that was now seated behind her monstrous rifle.
With the door secured again, the man turned and put his back up to it, his arms hanging limply at his side. He regarded Walter for a moment, then shifted his attention to Getty, who was fishing his cigarettes out of his pocket.
“You okay?” the rat-faced man said to Getty.
Getty just nodded. “Already been patched,” he murmured. He lipped a cigarette out. Lit it. The flame quivered. So did the cigarette.
Walter’s nerves were no better. His legs felt watery. His brain muddy. Everything in him jittery and jumpy and hellaciously pessimistic.
But the panic was gone. Strange enough.
Fear was there, yes. But a hard, sludgy kind. Like the panic had been cooked down and now it just clung to the insides of Walter’s soul like burnt grease. It was a livable kind of fear. The kind that you simply cohabitate with. The kind that you can manage to have sitting on your chest for a long, long time.
Later on, you’d pay, your heart would pay, it would eventually just quit, so many of its beats robbed from it by this calcification of dread. But in the meantime, at least you could think clearly.
When he had his cigarette lit, Getty looked around. He spotted the woman at the table and he nodded to her. “Bobbi,” he said, and there was relief there, but it was hard to hear under the utter lack of feeling. A few more glances into shadows and open doorways that led to empty, uninhabited rooms. “Anyone else?”
“We’re not enough for you?” the rat-faced man said, and it was so preposterous that Walter knew it had to be a joke, but the rat-faced man didn’t smile, and neither did Getty. Nobody smiled. There was nothing to smile about.
The rat-faced man swallowed thickly. “Virgil?” he asked, but there wasn’t any hope in his voice.
Getty sucked in smoke and blew it out. His rocksteady calm quavered, just a bit. His eyes tightened around the edges, like they might contort, like they might water again, but they didn’t, and his face went dead again. “Nah, brother.”
No one spoke.
From the window came a loud, wet sniff.
Walter didn’t want to look. He did anyways. Just a glance.
The woman—Bobbi—had her back turned to them, looking out the window. Her shoulders shook once, but she made no other sound.
The rat-faced man straightened up off of the doorway and looked at Walter. “We never got introduced. I’m Porter, but everyone calls me Rat.”
How appropriate, Walter thought, and then, That’s pretty fucked up.
Rat had his hand out.
Walter shook it. “Walt,” he said. “I haven’t been around long enough to get a name.”
Rat just nodded, gravely. “Walt works.” He shook his head as though exhausted with the triviality of all their words, and then he walked passed them and motioned them to follow. He pointed to one of two empty folding chairs. “Getty, why don’t you pop a squat and get off that leg.”
Getty did so.
Walter took the last remaining folding seat.
Rat stood.
After a moment, Bobbi turned back around and smiled s
weetly to Walter. “I’m sorry. I’m Bobbi. You’re Walter.”
Walter nodded. “Yeah. I’m Walter.”
“It’s good to meet you,” she said.
Prim, Walter thought, somewhat dazedly. What the hell is she doing here behind a rifle?
She didn’t look like she belonged. She looked like she should have been some upper-crust urby. She looked like she’d lived a life of privilege. She looked like the type of person that should have been touting the benefits of the Three Brothers, not out here fighting them to the death.
Walter wanted to dislike her, but she seemed very kind, and he couldn’t.
Then he remembered how she had jeered at Kuai when they’d made him piss his pants.
He almost laughed at the memory. The absurdity of it all.
Everyone’s got their secret sides, don’t they?
Rat let out a half-hearted chuff, and indicated Bobbi with a nod of his head. “Impeccable manners, this one. Even to the very end.”
Getty took the cigarette out of his mouth sharply and glared through a thin veil of smoke. “Don’t talk like that,” he said quietly. “It’s not the end.”
Rat’s mouth twitched. Like he was about to argue or apologize. But he decided to do neither. He looked out the window. “Any change?”
Bobbi settled into the rifle with the practiced ease of someone who has spent a lot of time there. “No,” she said. “I don’t have a good angle on the fighting anymore. There were ten of them last time I saw them. There’s a building in the way now. But the gunships have been pounding it for twenty minutes now.”
“Ten what?” Walter inquired.
“Resistance,” Rat said flatly. “Don’t know who they are, or who they’re with.”
Walter’s eyes coursed over the window, taking note that it was closed, and it was whole—Bobbi hadn’t shot through it. And there were no shell casings on the ground. He evaluated all of this with speed that even surprised himself, and he felt a little welling of indignation.
“You don’t know them, so you’re not gonna help them?”
He immediately regretted saying it. Sometimes exhaustion wears our filters away.
All three of them looked at him.
Bobbi spoke quietly, like she shared his shame in it. “There’s guntrucks with anti-sniper cannons down there. If I fired a shot, this place would be smoking rubble in about a half a second.” She shook her head and looked back out the window. “There’s nothing we can do for them now.”
“I need water,” Getty said, a little louder than was probably necessary.
“Yeah,” Rat said, happy for the change in topic. “We got water.”
“You need water?” Getty asked, looking at Walter.
Walter nodded. “Sure.”
Rat walked away, into the kitchen, which had the only sign of life, and that was a refrigerator unit. He left them there. The three of them, in a triangle. Bobbi looking out the window. Getty smoking down the last of his cigarette straight to the filter, and Walter, just watching him, not sure what to do. Not sure what to say.
He felt confused. He felt the beginnings of that old familiar anger. He wanted to do something. He wanted to be acting on something.
But they needed to sit. For just a damn minute. They needed to think. They need to drink some water. Try to clear all the blood and smoke and loss out of their heads and see if they could come up with something logical. Because just a lack of emotion didn’t mean that you were being logical. One could be unemotional and still make horrible decisions.
Why am I not feeling anything? Walter wondered, and it almost frightened him.
He felt the frustration. He felt the anger. But those had always been easy for him. They came easy to his nature, and they came easy to the life that he’d led.
But there was a muted quality to everything else. A washed out version of what he knew he should be feeling. And it concerned him. Frustrated him again. Round and round it goes, mirrors looking into mirrors, but the feeling never really spiraled into anything more, it just kind of hung around like shitty weather that would neither pour itself out nor break up and go away, but just lurked around and occasionally issued a meek pissing.
A lack of catharsis, he thought, remembering the word from half-assed English classes sometime in high school. He wasn’t dumb by any stretch, but what use does a grower have for a word like catharsis? There is no such thing. Not in their life. They simply muddled.
And that’s what he was doing now. He was muddling.
Muddling through it all, and clinging to that little word, almost obsessively, the way your mind fixates on something, sometimes a song, and you wake up with it looping in your head, never the whole thing, usually just a little snippet and it nags you to death like a rock in your shoe.
Catharsis
Catharsis
Catharsis
Your life
Everything
All of it
Everything you’ve done
It all LACKS CATHARSIS.
Walter bent forward, braced his elbows on his knees. The battle rifle hung awkwardly on him. He disliked it and he loved it all at once. It was an uncomfortable lover. Its strap chafed his neck, but he wouldn’t take it off. You couldn’t pay him to take it off.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” he muttered to no one in particular, and to Getty specifically.
Getty pulled out his pack as his own dwindled to nothing. He extracted one. Lit it off the nub of the one he’d just smoked, and he passed this to Walter. Then he did the same for himself. He dropped the butt on the carpet of the apartment and stamped it out.
Walter was momentarily offended.
Then he laughed.
Getty smiled, knowingly.
Walter took a drag on his cigarette and he thought the thoughts that he knew he shouldn’t be thinking, but which came to him nonetheless: Enjoy it. Revel in it. Really experience that cigarette. Taste that smoke. Feel that dumb haze settle on your brain, that makes you feel just a little bit lighter, just a little bit less compacted. Enjoy it because this might be your last.
He looked out the window at the sky. He couldn’t see the sunrise, but he could see the effects of it. He could see the way all the black and navy blue was melting away like colors in a wash. He could see the pink sun reflected in a few errant clouds, and they looked quite nice, even though they were picketed off by pillars of black smoke.
Yeah. That’s nice. That’s not a bad way to go.
He tried a second time to feel something, but it wasn’t there. And what was there to feel anyways? Fear? Oh, he had that. He wanted something better. He wanted to feel the richness of his loss, he wanted to feel the depths, explore them like a deep-sea diver, really get his hands in there and analyze the nooks and crannies of watching Tria gasp her last breaths and watching Virgil’s face get wiped from his head.
But there was nothing but dim shapes. Sharp things that would come for him and jab at him, but not now. Not in the waking hours. If he made it to another day, if he ever made it to a point where he could sleep again, they would come to him there. He would feel them there. And he would feel every bit of them, stripped away, naked and intimate he would feel them in a sensuality of terror and grief.
But now?
No. Not now.
Now there was a cigarette in his mouth and a sunrise in the sky.
Now there was nothing but nothing.
Rat returned from the fridge. He held two bottles of water. He had been gone an inordinately long time. Walter registered his eyes, which were red, but he decided not to look in them. He didn’t want to shame the man.
Would there be shame? No, there wouldn’t be. They all felt it. At least Getty did. And Bobbi did. And clearly now Rat did. He could not shame them. He envied them. Still, he didn’t look in Rat’s eyes, and he thought perhaps that Rat was relieved not to be seen.
He drank from the bottle of water and then held it, condensating and almost painfully cold in his hands. He felt it drip thr
ough his pants leg, and the cold kick-started the nerves in his leg, and he remembered how a good portion of his skin he’d left on the pavement several blocks east of them. He looked down at his blood-soaked pants and winced at the sight of his raw flesh peeking out from behind the shredded cloth.
He sat back. Looked at Getty. Then at Bobbi, who was fixated out the window, but looked listless, and he thought maybe she was just hiding her eyes. Then he looked at Rat. Didn’t react from the red-rimmed wateriness that he saw there. Just held the gaze. Man-to-man.
“What’s the plan?” Walter asked.
Chapter 24
Rat walked over to the table. He leaned back against it and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked at Bobbi. The woman looked back like someone who had forgotten her lines while in the bright lights of the stage.
Then she pulled back from the rifle and faced Walter and Getty with a sigh.
Her eyes were dry and clear now.
A coldness had settled over them, but it was a polite coldness. It was coldness directed inwards, not outwards. She was numbing herself, the very way that Walter was doing.
“Well,” she began, and then said nothing for several beats, her eyes falling to a spot on the floor that seemed to be the invisible center hub of their little circle of four. “We can’t get any sort of connectivity out,” she said finally. “We can’t connect to them. We can’t connect to friends outside—”
“We have no friends outside,” Getty said, evenly.
They all looked at him. They were confused.
Except for Walter. He knew what Getty meant.
Getty inspected the burning end of his cigarette, flicked ash rebelliously on the carpet. “We got hit at Tria’s safe house, on the other side of the District. One of her guys dimed us out. Except he wasn’t really working for the Fed or the CoAx.” Getty met their gazes now. To drive the point home. So they would know that he was serious. “Richard’s turned his back on us. The man that dimed us out at Tria’s safe house did it under Richard’s orders. He did it because Richard found out about Virgil and Tria’s…extracurricular activities. Subverting his little empire.”
“Virgil was his nephew,” Rat said numbly.
