The Night Market

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “We all come from somewhere, Yael, and that marks us forever, regardless of the choices we make. Jenny Frost came from a terrible place.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You can’t. No more than I understand your motivations,” Tobi said, arching his back. “An inherent difficulty with interspecies communications. You are rather remarkable, actually, in that you can hear me speak. Most of your kind have separated from the world to such an extent that they are no longer a part of it.”

  “You aren’t making sense!”

  “I’m telling you that Jenny Frost is inherently unsafe,” Tobi explained tersely. “How did you find yourself traveling with her?”

  “Bribery,” Yael admitted. “But...”

  “But nothing,” Tobi said, obviously satisfied. “She is acting in her own interest. Surely there will come a time when that means betraying you.”

  “None of that makes sense to me,” Yael complained. “Jenny is my friend.”

  “What?” Tobi looked appalled; something else Yael hadn’t known that cats could do until that moment. “You must be joking, Yael. She has treachery encoded in her very DNA.”

  “You know about DNA?”

  “Don’t be foolish. I know everything you do and much that you do not.”

  “How did you learn about something like that?”

  Tobi stared out the window.

  “That isn’t important. We must hurry, or...”

  “Tobi. How?” Yael insisted, crossing her arms. “Please, enlighten me.”

  Tobi muttered something unintelligible.

  “I can’t hear you...”

  “Television,” the cat admitted.

  “I thought so,” Yael said, petting Tobi to mollify the indignant cat. He purred despite his attempts to remain aloof. “How do you know so much about Jenny?”

  It took several minutes of scratching behind the ear before Tobi relented.

  “We cats... have our ways of knowing things. Jenny Frost is from a place far more cruel and frightening than you or I.”

  Yael rubbed Tobi’s belly thoughtfully.

  “That makes me feel sorry for her.”

  “You don’t understand,” the cat insisted, one paw twitching helplessly in the air. “Jenny Frost is not simply a bad person. She represents something far worse.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Not sure,” the cat admitted, yawning with satisfaction as Yael scratched behind his ears. “But I am certain that you are better off without her.”

  Yael reached for her windbreaker.

  “We have to go find Jenny,” Yael said, fumbling with the zipper.

  “Actually...”

  Yael stopped in the act of reaching for her gas mask.

  “What?”

  “I may already know where she is...”

  “Tobi!” Yael grabbed the cat, holding him so that his lower body dangled in the air. “Why didn’t you tell me that right away?”

  “Because I wanted to spare you the ugliness,” Tobi said sadly. “Now, I think you probably should see for yourself. You need to know exactly what you are dealing with.”

  Yael didn’t know what to make of that, so she finished getting dressed, brushed her teeth and threw her things back into her duffel.

  “Alright,” Yael said, strapping on her gas mask. “I am ready.”

  “We will find out if that is the case,” Tobi said, leading her out the window of her hotel room. “Shortly.”

  ***

  The elevator chimed and the doors slid open, nearly silent on greased runners. Jenny made it three steps onto the floral pattern carpet, thick pile and deep red, before Yael came bursting out of the stairwell door, gasping for breath, her mask up on the top of her head.

  “Miss Frost!”

  Jenny stood frozen in astonishment, a short, dusky man with a glistening pompadour directly behind her, craning his neck so he could see over her shoulder. Neither of them looked happy to see her.

  “What the hell?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “That’s what I want to know! You’re gonna get both of us killed!”

  “What the hell is goin’ on?” The man’s pompadour bobbed along with his vigorously nodding head, a compulsive movement, likely a result of nerve damage. “You bitches know each other?”

  “Shut up, Tim,” Jenny snapped, then grabbed Yael’s shoulders. “Why are you here?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” the man demanded, red-faced. “What is this shit?”

  “Would you be quiet?” Yael demanded coldly. “And watch your language, please.”

  “Listen, bitch,” he said, reaching beyond Jenny to grab for Yael. “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing…”

  Jenny pivoted and struck him in one smooth motion, the movement casual and brutal, the force of her rotation driving the palm of her hand into his face, crushing his nose and pushing him backwards. He cried out pitifully and pin-wheeled his arms before he fell head over heels down the stairwell. The door closed quietly behind him, but not before Yael heard his voice silenced with a sickening crash, flesh wetly yielding to concrete.

  “Told him to shut up,” Jenny observed coolly. “How did you find me?”

  “Did you… did you just..?”

  Yael’s thoughts were interrupted by Tobi darting between her legs and then across the room. Jenny lunged for the cat, but missed and ended up falling to her knees on the patterned carpet.

  “I knew it,” Jenny snarled, her face contorted with anger. “Goddamn cat.”

  “I told you not to trust her,” Tobi said, perched on top of a pile of broken furniture, safely out of Jenny’s reach. “Now she’s going to get us all killed.”

  “Shut up, vermin,” Jenny hissed. “Who invited you, anyway? And why aren’t you back at the room, Princess?”

  “Because I didn’t want to leave without you. Why are you here, Miss Frost?”

  “An errand for that hotel owner, and some business of my own.”

  “But what are you doing...”

  “No time to explain,” Jenny said, flinching at the sound of footsteps down the hall. “Hide your bag. Get your ass out of sight, cat, or I will throw you out the damn window.”

  “What?”

  Jenny moved with urgency, cuffing Yael and grabbing the gas mask from her head, then snatching her duffel and throwing it along with the mask down a convenient adjoining hallway. Tobi gave Yael one last reproving glance, then followed her bag around the corner and out of sight.

  “Miss Frost, what are you...”

  “Yael, you shouldn’t be here. Now that you are, I need you to follow my play, alright?”

  Yael didn’t have to think about it. She nodded and waited for further instructions.

  “Don’t make eye contact with any of them. You are too damn smart and they will see it. Don’t say anything. And when you hear your name, hit the floor, and stay until I tell you. Clear?”

  Yael nodded again, unable to swallow around the knot that had formed in her throat. Jenny was only halfway to her feet when the door opened. Two men walked out and stared with obvious suspicion. They were filthy, dressed mostly in scavenged leather, and heavily tattooed. One of them wore his gun openly, the revolver shoved down the front of his jeans, while the other had scars up and down his shirtless torso.

  “What is this?” The man with the scars face twisted in confusion. “Where is Tim?”

  “Couldn’t make it,” Jenny said cheerfully, walking boldly toward the men though she was a full head shorter. “Boy was so busy talkin’ that he had a little accident and fell down the stairs. You’ll probably find him at the bottom of the stairwell, give or take a floor.”

  The man with the gun seemed twice as nervous as the man with the scars, who kept glancing at Yael in a way she didn’t like.

  “Wait a goddamn minute. What happened to Tim?”

  “He made a mistake,” Jenny said, shrugging indifferently. “Couldn’t have been
important, or you wouldn’t have had him trolling for customers. I came here to score. Can we do some business?”

  The man with the gun kept reaching for his pants, then pulling his hand back and glancing at the scarred man, like he was waiting for an order he fully expected to get and was repeatedly disappointed.

  “Maybe. What’s with the girl?”

  The scarred man reached for Yael and she slapped his hand away by reflex before she thought about what she was doing. Yael worried momentarily that she had made a mistake, but then Jenny intervened, laughing.

  “My partner,” Jenny said, grabbing Yael’s shoulder as if she were holding her back. “And I’d watch your fucking hands if I were you.”

  The scarred man stared at his reddening hand as if he didn’t know what to make of it, while the man with the gun chuckled to himself.

  “And why is that?”

  “’Cause I’m the nice one,” Jenny said, grinning broadly, her teeth shining like serrated porcelain. “You don’t want to have to deal with her. Trust me.”

  Yael was trying very hard to be brave, but watching the scarred man lick his lips, what she felt was a combination of dread and profound nausea, along with a great desire to be watching the whole scene from the comfortable remove of her gas mask.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “I want to come inside and talk. You always do business outside your front door?”

  He shrugged, and then nodded at the man with the gun.

  Yael turned her mind off for the search, insisting to herself that she felt nothing at all when his crude, blunt hands groped her. She supposed that he was looking for weapons, but his hands lingered in places where nothing could be hidden. Then he pushed her rather roughly aside and reached for Jenny.

  “Aren’t you friendly?” Jenny said, smirking. “This the first time you touched a girl?”

  It was pathetically obvious, even in Yael’s terrified state, when the scarred man walked inside the door and waved for them to follow, that he had no intention of letting them leave. Jenny must have known; she must have seen what Yael saw in his eyes, but all Yael could do was hope as Jenny hustled her along, tugging her past the leering eyes of the guard at the door. Yael didn’t feel numb; she felt nothing at all, the horrid slow-motion inevitability of a bad dream.

  The hallway was short. The space on the other side had been an office during a more prosperous and legitimate point in the building’s history. It had clearly come to function as both ad-hoc storefront and a sort of live-in squat. There was a long glass display case with flickering neon tubes, empty inside but piled with the remains of old takeout, partially crushed beer cans, crumpled aluminum foil, and overflowing ashtrays. The room smelled of body odor, cannabis, old cigarettes and burning plastic. The carpet was stained and frayed, pock-marked with cigarette burns and strewn with bits of trash.

  Out of the corners of her eyes, careful to keep her head down and her hair in front of her face, Yael counted four people; the scarred man who had led them here, a man behind the counter with skin the color of the sunset and elaborately styled hair, a fat man with a mouthful of gold teeth next to the door, and a half-naked woman, eyes dilated and jaw slack, lying on a tired mattress in the corner of the room. The smoke was so thick that Yael could barely keep from coughing, desperate not to draw any attention to herself.

  “Well, well,” chortled the man behind the counter with the purple-red skin. “What do we have here?”

  “They want to buy,” the scarred man said gruffly, pointing vaguely in Jenny’s direction. “I think.”

  The man behind the counter laughed again, a crude sound that reminded Yael of the laughter that had haunted her in the halls of her school.

  “Is that so?”

  “Could be,” Jenny said amiably, freeing the narrow cord that held her ponytail, then running her fingers through her disheveled hair. “Assuming you got what I want.”

  Even with her eyes on the ground, Yael couldn’t help but notice how terrible all their teeth were when they smiled, even the stoned girl in the corner with the drooping, tattooed breasts. Not one person had a complete set, and the few teeth they retained were in various stages of yellowed decay.

  “And what’s that, sweetie?”

  Jenny laughed as if she were truly amused, wrapping the flexible metallic cord around her fingers. Yael was surprised that this was the first time she had seen Jenny with her hair down, rather than in her habitual ponytail.

  Her hair, Yael noted critically, was in desperate need of a cut.

  “Azure. AHS-125. You got that shit?”

  “Damn, girl. You only want the hard stuff. And what about her? What does she want?”

  Yael didn’t bother to look up. She knew there was a finger pointing in her direction, along with a roomful of ugly thoughts. She told herself she would not be sick, repeated it like a mantra in her head. Because Yael was fairly sure that dangerous criminals did not throw up during drug deals.

  “You to shut the fuck up and get to business, that’s what.”

  “Is that so?” The man leaned across the counter. “What do you have to offer in exchange?”

  With a resigned familiarity, Yael shut down her frantic thoughts, one by one, willing herself to be a machine, a robot, incapable of feeling. She could feel the potential violence in the room, the barely restrained savagery and deviance, like heat radiating from a furnace.

  People had died in this room. The thought floated through Yael’s mind, abstract to the point of meaninglessness to her shell-shocked brain. People had died here. And they would again – very soon.

  Yael was fairly certain that she was the last person in the room to realize.

  “I was thinkin’ money,” Jenny said icily, toying with the sparkling metal cord dangling between her fingers. “I don’t wanna hear about what you were thinking.”

  “Money is always good,” he said with a gap-toothed grin. “How much you got?”

  “None of your damn business. You got the shit?”

  “Oh, we have it,” he said, giving each of his men a rather deliberate grin before he started fumbling with something behind the counter. “Don’t worry about that. How much were you looking for?”

  “Everything you got.”

  Jenny strode forward and the men behind her shifted nervously. But all she did was lean her elbows on the counter. She then rested her chin in the palm of her hand and stared unnervingly at the man on the other side.

  “Alright, let me see. I could part with... let’s say... a gram of Azure, and two doses of AHS-125.”

  Jenny sighed theatrically.

  “Give me a break. I thought you guys were drug dealers. You are drug dealers, right? You are in the business of selling this shit? Because I’m starting to think that I’m wasting my time here.”

  The man behind the counter looked appalled, though Yael could tell that it was a bargaining gimmick. He glanced at her covetously, and Yael knew that he wanted to conclude the deal as quickly as possible. She clamped down on her thoughts before they could run any further in that direction.

  “I might let a bit more Azure go, but two doses are all I got of the 125.”

  “What? Word I got was you were big time. Guess everybody was wrong...”

  He puffed up proudly.

  “We are the biggest in town. But there isn’t much call for the 125. How about two grams Azure?”

  Jenny muttered blackly under her breath for a moment.

  “Fine,” she huffed. “Let me see it.”

  “We still need to discuss payment.”

  “Oh, whatever,” Jenny groused. “How much you want?”

  “I like round numbers, myself. How ‘bout a thousand?”

  Jenny pursed her lips and whistled.

  “No fucking way. Not in this lifetime. Five hundred.”

  “You have somewhere else you can go? I don’t think so. You would be lucky,” the man insisted, folding his arms across his chest, “to get ten milligrams downtown
, though you are welcome to try. Nine-fifty.”

  “Bullshit. Two grams? I could get that on the street. Six hundred.”

  “Yeah? You know any street dealer that has AHS-125? Because I would be very fucking interested in that information. I’ll go eight, but only if you show me your tits.”

  “That would be a first for you, wouldn’t it? I’m not running a charity for virgins, asshole. Six-fifty.”

  “Whatever, bitch. I’ll do seven-fifty, just to get you out of here. Final offer.”

  “’Kay,” Jenny said abruptly, with a manic grin. “Lemme see it first.”

  “Of course,” the man behind the counter agreed, pulling a key from a pocket in his leather vest and unlocking something that was hidden from Yael’s view. He placed two plastic ampules and two small bags of crushed blue leaf on the filthy glass countertop. “It’s good shit.”

  Jenny leaned forward to get a closer look, licking her lips, eyes rapt. The scarred man behind her moved quickly and quietly, closing the distance between them. The man behind the counter nodded shortly, and Jenny appeared not to notice. Yael wanted to scream, wanted to say something, but the sheer awfulness of the room paralyzed her. It was all happening so fast.

  Fortunately, Jenny didn’t need a warning.

  The scarred man dove for her, but he grabbed nothing besides air. Jenny dropped beneath his arms, then elbowed him viciously in the midsection. She took him down in one fluid motion, grabbing him by the back of his head and driving her knee into his face. His nose practically exploded before he fell over.

  “Hey, Yael,” Jenny said, winking in her direction. “Keep your head down.”

  Yael obediently dove to the ground, Jenny’s flippant wink freeing her from the grip of her fear, replacing it with anger and grudging admiration.

  The man behind the counter produced a shotgun, the old kind with two barrels side-by-side, while the fat man with gold teeth howled and charged Jenny with arms scraping the floor like an ape. The woman on the mattress retreated as far as the corner of the room would allow, drawing her legs up and giving Yael a rather unfortunate view of her nether regions. Then she began to wail like a banshee, the sound somewhere between laughter and a scream.

  Jenny didn’t wait for the fat man to come to her. She met him halfway, slipping a wild haymaker and then driving the top of her head into his solar plexus, her skull bouncing off his chest as if she had hit a wall. He fell to his knees and she moved around him, grinding her toe into the instep of his left foot as she pivoted. Jenny whipped the cord she had used as a hair-tie around the fat man’s massive throat and crossed the ends into a crude knot. She pulled with her whole body, bracing her knee against the center of his back for leverage, ignoring occasional slaps from his flailing arms.