Adrian
“I think I understand it now,” I once wrote. “Not why it happened but how. It wasn’t a fight for survival. There’s no fighting to stay alive when you’re already dead in everybody else’s eyes. It was about our right to fight at all, just to prove that we could. Now one of us is in the ground. And neither has won.”
A grievous failure of analysis on my part when it was written. But it was never about the reason I wrote it.
Another four months are behind me now, and I’ve faded from an active war zone into an underground robotics lab in the early morning with fourteen other people. And what the fuck am I doing with any of them?
I’ve had a long feeling that the world revolves around me specifically. But not like a child does before their object permanence seeps into their view of society around them. I think of myself like people who believed in geocentrism used to think of themselves some 600 years ago; the focal point of a chaotic and unpredictable world that seems to bend back and forth between light and darkness contingent upon the light or darkness of yourself and your moral purity—or lack thereof.
The storm changes direction depending on my state of mind. The longer I’m placated, the arc balances itself. People go to their jobs, they get fired, they put away retirement money, they lose their savings gambling, they have children, they have miscarriages, they get married, they get divorced—it doesn’t look better than it did yesterday, but it doesn’t look worse. Terrible things continue all over, but they only continue. And as I begin to unravel, the fabric around me begins tearing at itself. Everything stops making sense. People act without explanation. Specific characters vanish at times when they’re convenient and others take their place at the wrong time, as if the preordained order of events was deliberately substituted with a worse one in a surgical manner. It’s a difficult phenomenon to explain, much less understand myself. The thought never escapes that the whole world I see could be subject to my whims, if only my whims could be subject to me.
I should be placated right now. I have every reason to believe that everybody around me will see the light of day tomorrow. My worst fears about the Eclipse situation have been invalidated. The money they want will be coming to them on time and this nightmarish chapter will be closed.
Four months from the depths of a war zone are behind me. I’m sitting in an underground robotics lab at 8:30 in the morning with fourteen other people. And I’m feeling like complete shit.
Consistency is a vice, I suppose. I just wish it weren’t so obvious. I look around me in a room full of safe, healthy, well nourished, and freely housed people and see fourteen embodiments of all the nauseating feelings churning in my stomach. Graham, Skyler, Robyn, Percy, Nadia, Finn, Jae, Karan, Kacey, Aiden, Eliza, Ahmad, Kane, and a guy named Xander I don’t know all in the same room together, and it seems like Xander is the only one who knows why he’s here.
Eliza is trying the hardest to pretend like they have a purpose for being in this lab. They’ve been at a table in the back tinkering with steel beams and random engine parts to make some high school battle bot for the last hour, while simultaneously figuring out how to write code on their laptop to make the engine parts function. They, along with Karan, Jae, and Kacey have gotten precious little sleep since their midnight run with Brice to load up the four million dollars into a transport truck. It’s most obvious with Jae, who’s buried her head in her arms on the table, barely keeping her eyes open as she stares at everyone else in the room.
Karan wants to leave badly. He won’t stop darting his eyes around the room and scratching at the plastic table. Kacey’s growing irritation with the noise he’s making grows more obvious every second. I can only wonder which one of them is going to break first.
And Aiden? My oldest friend and the original person who linked me and Percy to the militia during college? What a fucking mess he’s turned into in the past 36 hours. I’m sure he appreciated the others leaving his name out when Brice interrogated them last night, given that they had to point it out to him three times before he stopped freaking his shit out. But even he knows that this is only a temporary reprieve. There’s no avoiding the fingers everyone will point at him when the bill comes due and Brice wants answers about the big secret. And so he sits in silence, counting down the hours he has left as if Brice were his stepdad holding a belt. It’s very hard to take the man in front of me seriously.
The others like to think they’re doing better than the latter five. Ahmad is gleefully chatting up a despondent Kane, and there’s a non-zero chance it’s to brag about all the stunts he pulled back in Medina. Kane is less than impressed that he and the rest of the militia were deliberately left out of the operation. If only somebody could just explain to him that it was nothing personal, and that Ahmad and Robyn were only specifically brought along to keep Graham and Skyler’s mouths shut about Aiden’s big secret with Orion.
Robyn… she’s also part of this room’s white noise of talking. She’s at her own table with Skyler and Graham. The lab’s current social climate is hanging on their conversation by its teeth. If they stop, everything goes quiet and being in this place becomes even less desirable. Whatever made it desirable to begin with is beyond me.
Only Robyn and Skyler are talking. Graham is busy staring at the table. He is clearly not having it right now. Maybe he’s still shaken up from his meltdown last night. I would be a little upset in his case too. I mean, running down that whole monologue, abandoning an important mission, thinking your whole life is about to end, only for all that tension to be cut down in the most anticlimactic fashion imaginable? Who could remain in high spirits after that, even if the worst crisis was narrowly averted?
Robyn says something in a dramatic tone of voice that I didn’t hear, which makes Skyler burst out laughing. It must have been one of the hundreds of copy-paste jokes at Graham’s expense that gets thrown around on a daily basis. He looks at the two of them and growls, “Jesus Christ, get a fucking room already.”
Robyn looks back. “Oh, really? I think we should, too.” He started clamming up. “What, does the thought of that make you uncomfortable? Do you feel a little weird thinking about some girl-on-girl action in your head?” He clammed up even more. “Come on, Graham, I want to hear your honest opinion on this; what do you think about gay sex?”
He snapped and yelled, “Do you want me to ask your dad that, or do you want to shut the fuck up?”
Robyn leaned back, surrendering the battle. “My dad’s dead, but whatever.”
Percy, Finn, and Nadia dwelled at the last table. Percy and Finn at the same table. Something is off here.
Has Percy been so humbled by the Medina experience that she’s forgiven Finn for his Eclipse performance? Or are neurons in her brain misfiring and mistaking him for Graham?
One second of pondering this and I realized it didn’t matter. It was a waste of time caring about, even a little. But what is everybody in this fucking room doing if not wasting their time?
And Xander… what is he thinking? All he’s here for is perfecting the code on his auto-navigating drone. He’s the only one who belongs. Having fourteen out-of-place intruders must feel a little destabilizing.
And the longer I stay here, the more destabilized I feel. We all woke up in the same hour, and we all convened in the same room at the same time. Why? And how? Did everybody else coordinate without me, and I just happened to show up with them? Why am I here?
This can’t be preordained. It wouldn’t be this obvious.
So am I really supposed to believe it’s just a coincidence that all the stars aligned this perfectly without any explanation?
The storm is supposed to sweep other people out of circumstance to subtly derail events. Not me. It must be getting more brazen now that I’m powerless against it. I fought it for months, and now it’s here for retribution.
9:30. One more hour behind me. One more hour, and the place I started has grown harder to see behind me.
And this is the soul-crushing pit I find myself in.
Xander is testing the AI of his drone with a setup of foot-high Styrofoam walls. It’s interesting and a little charming watching the little thing whiz around on its own, then drop on its wheels and slowly navigate its way through the course. It’s tempting to see it like a sentient small animal; a pet gerbil, almost. If only its capabilities went beyond traveling mazes. But it knows nothing else, and it won’t until the new thought gets plugged into it.
Maybe we’re that drone also. But I digress.
An hour of our time has been lost to this lab, and no significant development has occurred. This feels like a joke.
Karan was on the verge of storming out of here. Now he’s bored on his phone. Kacey is putting the frame together of Eliza’s robot. Aiden pulled out a laptop of his own and is likely playing a game if the positions of his fingers on the keyboard are any indication. Percy and Nadia moved to my table and started a card game between us. Jae got a book. Graham and Ahmad are situated on the floor, adding dozens of screws into a slapdashery of metal bars, frames, and wheels in random and inefficient places. Kane, Finn, Skyler, and Robyn left to get breakfast.
Only four are missing and the rest are settling in. They’re all ready to spend another hour sitting in here.
I wish I could ask them why. I wish there was any response I could garner other than “I don’t know,” and “Just because.” But I don’t know what this is for either, so I can’t give myself away. Nobody will understand. It won’t let them.
What am I missing? What is it about this specifically assembled party that means anything? Where else would they have gone after waking up? And who took their place?
I could leave right now and this charade would be over. I can take the storm with me out of this room and stop whatever it’s doing.
But can I? Or was this card game with Percy specifically placed to keep me from moving? I know that I can’t just abandon her here without explanation.
And I know I have to not give an explanation. I can’t tell them I’m just going to the bathroom, because then they’ll find their way back to me when I don’t come back myself.
They’ll also come back for me if I say nothing.
What a fucking predicament I’ve been cornered in right here. It could have only been preordained.
10:30. An hour ago, the place that I started was easier to see in the distance. Now it’s slightly less so. But even now, it’s slightly more visible than it will be in another hour. And then, it will be slightly more visible than it will be an hour after that. Ad infinitum. Until one of those hours I won’t be able to see it at all.
I look around me once more, and the path which led everyone to this room is even more obscured.
Skyler is back.
Why is she back? She had the perfect out from this an hour ago, but she came back. For what?
Robyn didn’t come back. Skyler was brought back without Robyn. This is not normal.
Kane and Finn are still missing as well, but the same number of faces are still in the lab. Three new people have substituted the others. I’ve never met them, but I hear their names spoken: Jaime, Javier, and Aalia.
The three of them are at Karan’s table now talking amongst each other, along with Percy and Nadia, holding together the room’s social fabric in substitute of Skyler and Robyn. Do they all matter now? Or were they lured in to keep Karan from wandering off?
Jae has stopped reading her book and is now taking a nap on the table. Of all the places she could have chosen, it was right here in the robotics lab, full of constant noise pollution, where she wanted to take the edge off her sleep deprivation. And due to said noise pollution, the sleeping effort will last an extra amount of time. She has interacted with nobody. Why her?
Skyler is walking around the lab, inspecting shelves and digging through drawers looking for something to do. There are numerous other rooms and areas all over the base with specifically designated activities, but she walks around in here. Not even she seems to know what she’s doing without Robyn.
Graham and Ahmad have reached the stage in their build where they stack the cluster of beams and plates as far up as qualifies as completely unreasonable. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy with no true ending. No matter how far high they build up their tower, the unreasonability of its current height will always be trumped by the unreasonability of building it higher. The limit of time they’re willing to waste is only the limit of their desire to be unreasonable. And this is Graham and Ahmad.
Eliza and Kacey’s robot has a full base, wheels that accelerate and turn based on controller input, and half a claw arm that will be able to reach up and down and rotate once finished and coded. Eliza began this battle bot with a broad mandate to make it do things in a fight. And so far, it can only do one.
Xander has taken some of the engine parts off his drone and is code testing them. He’s the only one who doesn’t belong with this. He doesn’t mean anything in the bigger picture, and he’s stayed on his own the past three hours. I wish he would leave for his own good. But he wants to perfect his pet drone. And he’s the only one who has free will.
What do you want with these people? Why are you going out of your way to keep them in this room?
They could leave here any moment they wanted, and they would have every reason to do so. Chief among them is that they’ve already been dwelling here for over two and a half hours and to stay any longer would be completely deranged. But what are they supposed to care?
They haven’t even had breakfast yet. Only Skyler has left the room to eat, and she came right back. Why are they choosing to starve for this long? Why are Karan, Eliza, Kacey, Percy, Nadia, Graham, Ahmad, Jae, and Skyler still here?
Four of them have to leave in two hours to meet with Eclipse agents. And they really want to sit here for four hours waiting until then? With all these other people who have nothing to wait for?
Get out of here. Go. Wait somewhere else. Stop tangling yourself deeper into this.
Get out!
11:30. Three hours forward, and the distinctness and obviousness of the previous hours has vanished in a hazy fog. This moment looks to have stopped trying to make sense. Or maybe I’ve stopped trying to make sense of it. I won’t move anywhere, so there’s little point in manipulating me to stay.
But why them?
Javier and Jaime are gone. Aiden is too, but he left his laptop where he was sitting.
Empty paper plates are sat on all of the tables.
…What the fuck? No. They left to get breakfast and then they brought it back? What the fuck are you doing?!
All the same faces are still in this room. But they’re not at their tables or spots on the floor anymore. Everybody is gathered around the arena they set up across the lab for their robots to drive around. And Graham and Ahmad’s four-foot-tall metal fortress is at the center of it.
Jae, Karan, Eliza, Graham, Ahmad, Percy, Nadia, Skyler, and Kacey; here three hours ago, and here now.
I keep waiting. I keep asking why. And then another hour passes. But the nine of them just won’t go somewhere else. There’s always one more distraction, one more random thing to do.
How many more hours are expected of me? When will this end? And do I want it to?
I could keep waiting and keep asking why for another hour. But that would miss the point. There isn’t a reason that any of them understand. Human behavior is often unexplainable, motivated by empty urges to random places with no identifiable context or line between one thought to the next.
The minds in this room are empty. And in that void, the storm has free reign.
One more hour and Jae, Karan, Eliza, and Kacey will be on the way to East Cleveland. What then? What will the remaining six do? Is it them that I should be watching, and the other four are just here by coincidence? Or is it the other way around?
I know I won’t see it until it happens. The futility is inescapable.
I just need to wait another hour.
Wait until 12:30.
Keep waiting. Just how you’re supposed to.
…
How bold of me to talk about other people wrapped in self-fulfilling prophecies. How long was I out there, fighting to separate from the storm, only to see I had never left its clutches?
There’s nothing left but to embrace it.
There are no choices.
Just open your mind.
Let it fill the void.
Just wait another hour…
You’ll see it all then……
12:20.
…What?
No. That wasn’t an hour. That wasn’t an hour! Why the fuck is it not 12:30?!
The four are supposed to be out the door in less than ten minutes, and yet here each of them are.
Why?! Why not wait in the cafeteria where you’re closer to the garage? You had every fucking opportunity!
…What are you really waiting for?
Karan, on his phone next to Aiden’s abandoned laptop. Jae, fully awake now and talking to him. Eliza and Kacey, putting away the unused parts for their arm robot.
Well… they’re at least ready to leave. They won’t be delayed or hampered before they’re off to East Cleveland. Of course. It would have been too obvious to derail something I was already anticipating. This isn’t about them.
Ahmad and Graham’s fortress is still in the center of the arena, while they are rooting through a stack of shelves full of board games. Skyler found a flattened ping-pong table behind a bunch of cabinets against the wall and is looking nearby for a ball and rackets. Nadia is helping search inside a small storage room that has seldom been touched in years. Percy is picking apart chunks of a Lego Statue of Liberty model she found and piecing them back together, with the end goal of being able to put the whole thing together from memory.
And as the fog slips deeper, time begins to resume.
Percy snaps the statue off its pedestal and picks pieces off the sides of it. Nadia picks up a dusty box out of the closet, sets it on the floor outside, and digs through it. Skyler opens and closes a set of cabinets next to her. Ahmad has a board game pulled out from the shelf and is quietly conversing with Graham about it.
What am I waiting for? What is happening?
Graham asks Ahmad something. Ahmad pauses and looks up, thinking. He snaps his finger and says loud enough to hear, “I’ll go grab Kane.” He pulls out the board game, tosses it onto a nearby table, and rushes out of the lab.
Does it want Kane now? Or does it not want Ahmad?
Skyler is still opening and closing cabinets. Nadia is still searching her box. Percy is still picking apart the Statue of Liberty pedestal. Graham is waiting at the table for Ahmad to return. Kacey, Karan, Eliza, and Jae are waiting to leave for East Cleveland.
We’re all just sitting here. Waiting. More seconds tick away in this empty hole of space and time. And nothing happens.
We’re just waiting for something to happen.
A sound came from Karan’s direction. But the sound didn’t come from Karan. Everybody looks towards him. He searches around the table and under it, behind him, to his left, to his right—he sees something on the bench to his right. He picks up Aiden’s radio, which was left behind along with his laptop.
“Is anybody there?” it says.
“Who is this?” Karan responds.
As everybody circles around in anticipation, it asks, “Is Graham there?”
Karan eyes Graham. He shrugs. “What do you want with him?”
“I’m the informant from Eclipse. I helped plan his break-in a few days ago.”
And now it’s happening.
“I’m just here to warn you, however many of you there are. I don’t know if you found out when that giant media fiasco happened, but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye, and even I barely know a fraction of it. But in my efforts to get answers, I found out something else that you may need to know. Something urgent.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about those people in Cleveland that you worked with at some point. There’s a whole list of names being sent around in emails; Parnel Bryson, Jaxtyn Monroe, Korey Rosetta, Josey Danniel, Elliott Boone, Cameron Lewis, Alene Judd, Camellia Hartley, Carolanne Sinclair, Harrietta Truman, Hadyn Abbey, Mykhaila Emerson, Elroy Burns, Karina Lyndon, and Jade Ashworth. Ring any bells?”
Every bell was rung in Graham’s head. “Fuck. Those are the owners of all thirteen businesses I commissioned to put Solaris underwater. And Korey was our main partner.”
“Cameron is Linda’s son!” Skyler whisper-yells. “He helped when I snuck into their house!”
Karan responds to the radio, “Yeah. We know them.”
The voice continues, “Well I overheard some of the higher-ups a while ago talking about them. I got ‘em on wire. And they ordered a ‘security team’ out to Cleveland an hour ago to find and capture these guys and bring them out to Cincinnati. That money you swiped from that puppet charity? They really want it back. I don’t know what they’re trying to do with the lot of ‘em, but if one of ‘em is let go or escapes and calls the cops… you’re probably going down with ‘em.”
Every voice starts talking in sequence.
“No! They can’t find Cameron, he’s only a teenager!”
“But they already retracted the Solaris money when they closed!”
“We’re never going to escape Korey. They just won’t fucking let us.”
“What do they even have to gain by taking all of them prisoner?”
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“We need to get to Cleveland right now before they do.”
“We can’t do this now, we have to deliver our money to them in just a few minutes!”
“Fucking bastards. They’re trying to take more hostages to squeeze more money out of us. This isn’t about Solaris.”
“Fuck. Fuck! What do we do, then?”
Karan holds his hand up to everyone and asks the radio, “How much time do we have?”
“Should have plenty if you aren’t in Cincinnati. It’s four hours to and from on a normal day, so I’d say they have another two forty-five ahead of ‘em.”
Karan sets the radio down. “Okay. If we leave now, there will still be just enough time to find them all and take them into hiding. And if there’s fifteen of them… we’ll need six cars. Jae, Kacey, Nadia, Eliza, and… I guess only five of us can drive.”
Graham cuts in, “Fuck no, Karan, what the fuck are you doing? You have our goddamn money to deliver! If you miss that, we are all fucked!”
“We can’t! If we want to get them all out of there, then it has to be all of us and right now!”
“Well the rest of us can drive too, wiseass! We can go out on our own while you guys do your business!”
“You are absolutely not going out there without one of us. And they clearly have no intention of living up to their promise if they’re trying to take hostages at the same time. Now are the rest of you coming with us?”
Skyler chimes in first. “I need to go to get Cameron.”
Then Percy. “I’ll have to go so Korey trusts us.”
Then Graham. “And I guess nobody else is going to trust us unless I’m going with as well. Fuck me.”
Karan grabs the radio and says, “Thank you for the warning.” He puts it in his pocket and shouts, “Then let’s go! We’ve already wasted enough time!”
And the group began running with him out of the robotics lab.
Percy was about to go with, but ran over to me first. “Adrian?”
Whatever she was expecting of me, I had no ideas. Am I supposed to go along with them? Or do I tell her I’m just not feeling it at the moment and stay here?
No, don’t be stupid. You can tell her something other than that.
“I… I’ll go tell Brice.”
She nodded. “Okay.” And then ran out the door.
Was I meant to do that? Why did I do that? And why did Percy understand it so quickly? Does she think I’m going to tell Brice instead of going with, or is she going to wait for me in the garage?
…What the fuck just happened?
Two minutes ago, we had been waiting in this lab for more than four hours, wasting our time with robots and attempting to find games. Now we’ve collectively agreed to abandon the peace deal with Eclipse and are on a rush to pull our old Solaris associates out of Cleveland.
Why did they trust that guy so quickly? Was it just because he said he was the informant? Any random hacker or Eclipse employee could have pulled up that list of names and told us they were all about to be taken prisoner. It’s seems like such an obvious attempt to lure them out in the open in predictable locations. And they just… went right along with it. Uncritically.
They just started a war because a guy over the radio told them it was going to happen. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
No. I didn’t agree to anything.
I took one last look around the empty lab. And in the eye of the storm, I left.
I ran straight to the cafeteria at the perfect time. Brice was walking down the hall ahead as I approached the main entrance.
I shouted his name while running to him.
“Bloody Christ. if you’re about to deliver even more bad news to me, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Someone talked to us over Aiden’s radio. They said Eclipse was sending people to capture everyone we worked with in the Solaris job.”
“You—goddammit. God damn it all to hell.” He rubbed his eyes and walked past me to the cafeteria entrance. “Do the constant waves of nausea never cease? Is this whole week just destined to get worse?” He entered the cafeteria with me behind him. The only person inside was Roman, sitting at a table with a duffel bag. “And where the fuck are the people delivering the money?!”
“They already left,” I explained. “They’re abandoning the deal to save our associates.”
Brice stared out for a second to process the situation. “No. No, they are not.” He whipped his phone out and called somebody. After nearly running out the ringing, they answered. “Karan! Where are you?!”
I couldn’t hear his response, but it was lengthy.
“Karan, this is not up for negotiation! You are not the one who decides priorities here, least of all when it comes to stopping a factional war!” Muffled response. “So what? That’s not a direct attack on us, and it doesn’t contradict the deal you brokered!” Longer muffled response. “You don’t know that! You don’t get to guess what their intentions are and then blow up our entire operation based on that! This was not your choice to make!” Another long response full of dramatic tonal shifts. “Look, we’re not abandoning the deal. We can’t. But you are not going to start anything out there, do you understand? We are going to close the chapter with Eclipse today, and if you see any sign of their agents anywhere, you get the fuck away. Grab who you can, don’t leave a single trace that you were there, and drive straight back here. Are we clear?” Muffled yes. “Okay.” He hung up.
Only one person in the cafeteria at 12:30? Where is lunch?
Ahmad appeared in the hallway with Kane. Brice noticed. “Ahmad! Kane! Roman! Over here!” All three stopped what they were doing and rushed over. “It’s 12:30, you need to the get the four million to East Cleveland right now. It’s in the blue Chevy parked up front all the way to the right. The keys are in the cup holder. You know where to go?”
Ahmad replied, “End of Brightwood Street, right?”
“Yes. Now go!”
They instantly sprinted back down the hallway and disappeared down it.
Brice turned around. “Adrian? You have military training under your belt, I assume you’ll know what you’re doing?”
I nodded.
“Then go with them.”
And without thinking, I sprinted down the hall myself and caught up with the others.
Just like that, the five minutes of chaos was capped and over with. And rather than waiting in a robotics lab with fourteen people, I was waiting in a truck with three and two duffel bags with four million dollars.
The storm got exactly what it wanted in an almost theatrical fashion. Every star aligned just where it needed to at the right time. One group heading to Cleveland is seeking to avert a war with Eclipse. And the other is throwing themselves directly into a line of fire aimed in a separate direction. And what happens next may be too rapidly developing for any outside force to control.
But the conditions are laid regardless. Perhaps neither of us is heading into an unpredictable tornado. Maybe there really is only one way things can go now.
Consistency is a vice. As it always remains.
---
I don’t think about East Cleveland very often. As it turns out, neither do the people in charge of it.
No flattering pictures of the city have been taken in decades. Every other building down every street is run down and/or fully reclaimed by nature. Every single tree and bush is badly overgrown. Weeds seep from the sides of every single sidewalk slab. The roads down every neighborhood are charred with a patchwork of cracks and potholes. Euclid Avenue, once Millionaires’ Row in a whiter, more affluent time period, is now a lifeless husk of gas stations, asphalt, unrenovated square brick buildings, and empty space. Writing on one abandoned building marred with graffiti next to a near-empty car dealership reads, “Same Shit Different Day.” And 13,000 people call this home.
And the street that we’re headed for is reportedly one of the worst in the city. From what Google Maps shows, the only sign of life traveling down it is a few cars parked along the side of the road. In 2007, the street was lined with dozens of densely packed houses and people hanging out and wandering outside. Today, empty plots of grass and wooden posts remain where all but nine of the houses used to be. And the first one to the left, which was once visibly occupied, is now broken down and blanketed with overgrown trees, hiding away a single car behind drooping branches and a makeshift metal fence. One old house was demolished after failing to attract prospective owners with a double-digit mortgage. Another, before it was demolished, was covered in graffiti memorializing someone named ‘Lil Joe’ who died April 30, 2007, five months from his 19th birthday.
All the windows are boarded or curtained off. Nobody goes outside. Nobody trusts their neighbors. There’s no room for dreams or aspirations. All that can be done is finding the money to stay alive. And the emptiness spreads further like a virus with each passing year as the city reaches out for a helping hand nobody is willing to lend.
2:40. Fifteen minutes to go. Even after the hiccup at the base, we’re still on track to arrive early. And everybody else heading to Lakewood should already be arriving at their first stops. But they won’t be notifying any of us about that.
Ahmad is driving. Roman is in the passenger seat. And I’m sitting in the back with Kane.
Kane handed me a pistol an hour ago. “You’ll never use it, but you’ve got to have one,” he told me. “Yeah, I was with the military,” I said back. “Same rule applies out there.”
And something about driving down I-71 towards Cleveland reminded him of that interaction.
He looked at me and asked, “You said you were in the military? What branch?”
“Army. Served eleven years my first go-around before college and made it to special forces. And I just came back a few weeks ago from a four-year deployment to Syria in the infantry.”
“Huh. What draws you to both this and the military?”
Interesting. How honest do I wanna be about this? “Hm. Well, when I started, it was about regaining control. I just… wanted an escape. To make my own decisions and to have them matter. I would have done anything back then to be an independent human being that impacted the world around him in whatever form that took. And after two years of working night shifts at a Kroger right out of high school, the military was the best safety net I had until Aiden pulled me in with the militia. But when I left for Syria a couple years later, that changed. Something in me just… pulled back. I grew tired of being important. I wanted a lane to fit in, rather than a spectacle.”
“You went to Syria for less of a spectacle?”
“I went there as a kind of retreat. To blend in, to take orders, talk shit with other soldiers and occasionally join attacks on an enemy we were never going to defeat under a president constantly trying to get us killed. It may not make sense to you, but there was a kind of… peace in the simplicity.”
Kane shrugged. “It’s enough to wrap my head around. Nothing makes you at peace quicker than always being on a needle’s edge of death.”
“What about you? What draws you to this job above anything else?”
“Shit. That requires me to go way back. It was ten years ago, almost to the day, when I was brought in. I was barely in my 20s and still living with my fucking parents because I had nowhere else to go. I had the job at their workshop that they wanted, I paid for the family phone plan they wanted so they could surveil my internet activity, I did all of the caretaking for my toddler brother how they wanted, I cleaned the house whenever and however they wanted, I made every one of their meals whenever they wanted, and if I had the nerve to detest their authority, I would get barricaded in the basement for the rest of the day with a few books and whatever was contained in the stack of years-old U-Haul boxes to keep me occupied. I was essentially their hostage. All the money I made came from them and it could only be spent on them, all in the name of ‘paying us back.’ ‘We gave you a home your whole life, the least you can do is wash our fucking dishes.’ ‘We tirelessly raised you for eighteen years, you have no right to keep secrets from us.’ ‘How many thousands of meals have we fed you over your childhood? And you’re gonna throw a fit because we just want you to make our breakfast once?’
“They just wanted an even score between us and treated parenthood more as an investment for their future comfort. And I suffered for years because of it. I had no friends. I had no hopes, no dreams, no desires. I couldn’t. And the more I snooped through social media on my mom’s phone while she slept, the more I realized what I was missing. My loneliness turned into anger. And the more they policed my behavior, the angrier I got. And so ten years ago, when they got angry back, I killed them. Pushed mom down the stairs and nailed dad in the throat with a hardcover book. I got taken straight to jail, where a certain guy who took interest in my situation after stopping by our workshop bailed me out and introduced himself as Brice. Knowing next to nothing about me prior, he took on my defense in the murder case against me all the way to trial, claiming I couldn’t have understood that hurting my parents was wrong because they didn’t understand hurting people was wrong themselves. The moment my sentence of probation and mandatory counseling came down, Brice disappeared me from the system and brought me to Columbus.”
“Brice was your lawyer?”
“Yeah, and a damn good one. He had a stint as a public defender before joining the militia. But what drew me to the militia’s work back then was that it was a way to get back at my parents. To spit on their graves and show that I could do good things without being told to. That there was a world bigger than them full of people who could have their day rescued with just one of the hundreds of meals I instead put together for their privileged asses. Over time I started to appreciate the virtue of the work rather than the spite-filled motivators, but the real turning point came shortly after my first year. At the time, we had a team of about 17 people on a police corruption case in Chicago, and they worked with a guy with inroads in the department and the D.A.’s office to expose it to the public. Unfortunately, at the last second before the team could blow the lid off the case, he turned the tables on them. He personally led a police raid into their city headquarters and cornered them in a room underground. All four of my closest friends were down there. And the entire team was shot down in seconds. It was the worst massacre against the militia in its 56-year history. But at least their stray bullets took out that turncoat motherfucker, whatever his death was worth.
“But it was during their funerals when I realized something, and it’s what keeps me going to this day. It’s that there are millions of other people around this country who are experiencing exactly what I did with my parents, just under different masters. People who take orders all day uncritically, who have been taught to shut up and know their place, who are being held hostage and unable to make anything with themselves. People who had the right to the pursuit of happiness stripped from them either by economic turnover or by birth in the wrong family. It’s those people that I fight for now. I alone am not going to fix the entire economy and the worst vestiges of human nature, but if I can bail out just one other person who was trampled for daring to take a stand, then I made the world a better place.”
“How very noble of you, Kane,” Ahmad said with a sarcastic undertone. “You’re certainly one for giving inspiring monologues.”
“I’m sorry, are you trying to accuse me of moral grandstanding? Why don’t you tell Adrian your story?”
“Aw, shiiit. You’re not gonna like it.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Heck. Well, it starts with my mom and pops sending me and my brother across the border from Guatemala way back in ’06. The bitchass sponsor we ended up with sent us and the rest of the migrant children he ‘sheltered’ to work overnight shifts at a Hearthside factory almost every day after school. We blended right in with the others, but we weren’t as complacent; because we were itching to get the fuck out. We tried over and over again to sneak away while on the job or slip out the window at home overnight, but there was always some fucking security goon or cop around every corner to stop us. Fast-forward a few years and we’re finally becoming adults and shit. We’re physically daunting, and our spirits are unbreakable. And as we’re getting ready to execute our grand escape from the factory and run the fuck away from Indiana, here comes Big Joel’s fat ass, standing in our way once again. And my brother, in his infinite bravery, decides to sacrifice himself so I can get out. He fights Big Joel to keep him distracted while I run out of the factory and into town as fast as possible. My brother is defeated and put back to work.”
As he was speaking, I noticed we had turned out of the highway and were now driving into Cleveland. The road went through the middle of a park, with a plethora of tall and bushy trees blocking the urban scenery past the hills to either side of us. Public benches could be found in clearings everywhere, and sidewalks were carved in and around the cultural gardens. I made sure to take stock of the peace of the moment before we entered the east.
“And for the next two years, I’m out living as a nomad, sticking my thumb out and traveling up and down the Midwest, avoiding the cops, barely scrounging enough food to stay lean. Until one November 6, 2012, when I’d gotten myself tangled in the web of big city Columbus and made the fortunate decision to sleep for the night down in the parking garage the militia base is connected to. And that was on the same night Obama got reelected, almost like the gods themselves ordained for the stars to align in harmony for just those few hours. But it was after joining ranks that I went on to find my brother had died six months ago after a bad conveyer belt accident. Everything I do now is for him, and all people in situations like his.”
There was a pause, and then Roman sneered, “You watered that down so goddamn much that I should be laughing in your face right now.”
“Excuse me, Sherlock, but it’s an emotional subject for me. Can’t a guy be allowed to have feelings?”
The closer we came to the boundaries of East Cleveland, the more apparent it became. The nature quickly disappeared and was replaced with parking lots and flat patches of grass. The most obvious sign was passing the so-called Jonell Centre, a small building whose back end was enveloped in moss spreading out like mold, whose rusty wooden walls were breaking apart, and whose stone front-facing wall was badly discolored.
Kane asked, “Hey, Roman, why don’t you tell your story next?”
He snorted. “My story is nothing to follow up either of yours with, but if you insist. The short of it is that I was limbo in the foster care system from the day I was born until I aged out of it, where I traveled around with a homeless group that got kicked out of every city we stayed in until I accidentally got thrust into the middle of a gang war just a few miles away from here, where I first encountered one of the militia’s undercover teams and stuck with them to the point of recruitment. There’s a whole lot of granularity between the key events that would take a whole novel to get into, but that’s the basic gist of it. It’s why my field work is mostly contained to supporting homeless and poor children.”
Ahmad said, “Tell him about Gloria.”
That name made Roman physically uneased. “Fuck no, I’m not—okay, it wasn’t really like—hell, this is the granularity shit I just talked about. Shit. Basically, it was a long eighteen years. I met a lot of people, and occasionally, a few stood out more than others.”
Ahmad looked away from the road and back to me to say, “He had a girlfriend for four months, but she moved shelters.”
“How many fucking relationships have you been in, Ahmad? What is that? Zero? Oh, that’s right, you fucking panzee. You’re just mad that I have a better life story than you, and that I got my love life over with before joining the militia and catching a thing for Kiera before realizing relationships weren’t allowed.”
Ahmad flashed a death stare at him for multiple seconds until Roman slapped his face back toward the road.
Kane asked me, “Have you been in a relationship before?”
I bluntly replied, “No.”
Three minutes left. We passed by more and more lifeless run-down buildings riddled with graffiti or turned into Baptist churches, one which had two cheap paintings stuck on the wall that together read the Lorax quote, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Even the big middle-class-looking homes we passed were aging or buried behind trees and bushes. The roads began looking cracked as an eggshell hit with a hammer. We turned onto the Millionaires’ Row street and then onto Brightwood, which wasn’t even marked with a sign.
The state of the street was even more dismal than Google could capture. The first house to the left that it showed online was now reduced to a patch of dead grass, blending with the near-fully deserted left side of the road. The homes that have survived the purge feel even more empty in person. The metal grates placed over the windows of one house make me think of 2007, and the life that used to be on display in this same area. The issue of severe poverty was just the same back then, but at least they had a visible community. Now, all that’s left is poverty and the ashes from a failed system that couldn’t even provide solace.
Four cars were parked at the end of the street. Two were blocking both turns onto Forest Hill Avenue while the other two were further down Brightwood, one facing us and the other facing opposite with its trunk open. Two people were sitting inside, and they stepped out as they saw us approaching.
Ahmad veered left and then turned to park the truck diagonally along the street a few yards away from them, adjacent to two houses on the left. Between the houses was a cracked driveway leading around the back with a tiny garage shed. There’s a more recently paved driveway going behind the other side of the house farthest down. The windows on both were covered by curtains. These kinds of gatherings must happen often if they can be done right next to people’s homes.
One by one, the rest of Eclipse’s men stepped out of the four cars, amounting to a huddle of seven people in front of us.
“That is… more people than I expected,” Ahmad whispered before opening his door. The four of us stepped out of the truck.
Roman and Ahmad walked to the trunk while Kane and I walked up front to face the seven alone. The five at the front of the pack had visible pistols tucked into their jeans while the two behind them were holding assault rifles. I felt naked as they silently stared us down. I felt my pistol in my pants pocket, covered by my shirt. I considered tucking my shirt behind it to be less vulnerable, but I don’t want them seeing me reach for a gun obviously poking out of my pocket. So I remained still and waited.
Ahmad and Roman opened the trunk. I checked my watch. 2:57. Have Korey and the others been picked up yet? Why do I feel like we should have heard something from them by now? I know that Brice is the one they would be updating, but would Brice have relayed it to us?
There’s a reason this happened. The storm brought the two teams together where they are to make something else happen. How much fucking longer do I have to wait until I realize? Has it already happened? Did something happen to the other team that I don’t know about and this group was assembled by coincidence?
I hear a struggle behind me. The truck is bouncing as they try to lift the duffel bags out of the trunk.
“Holy fuck, this thing is heavy,” Ahmad whispers.
“That’s because there are 20,000 dollar bills in it,” Roman says back. “Now get a move on.”
Ahmad grunts as he powerlifts the bag out of the trunk. Roman takes a second before picking up the other one.
Just a couple more minutes until this is over with and I can call Percy. I need to find out.
I looked at the two houses on my left. The one on the right had a front porch like a brick shed surrounded by a small garden, with only a small figurative window to see inside between the brick walls and the blue awning. A family that has to live in darkness to feel safe. I can only imagine what it’s like inside.
They used to have two neighbors to their right. They used to have another three neighbors in front of them on the other side of the road. They used to have a line of neighbors living along Forest Hill. Now there are three fields.
The assault rifle guy on the left is standing next to a basketball hoop on the sidewalk, pinned down by two cinder blocks. The plastic backboard has two massive broken holes in it and the rim is dangling off of it. This is how kids are supposed to stay entertained with nowhere else to go.
Ahmad has walked around the truck with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder and lifting it up by the handle. He trudges in front of me and Kane and drops it on the asphalt. The bag remained stiff, full to the brim with cash. Roman is still at the trunk. Ahmad walks back to help him get the bag out.
My stomach sank deeper with each extra second we wasted here. I want to leave. My breath is steadily leaving my body. I’m having to keep my limbs still so they don’t shiver with antsiness.
Roman and Ahmad both carry the second duffel bag out of the truck and start walking it toward us. I hear every grunt, every individual step forward, the crunching of the asphalt, and the shuffling of the money inside as separate sound bites. I see the seven men ahead continue to stare at us, growing ever less patient. I feel the wind pick up in the 40-degree air, breezing through me and my T-shirt.
I hear a separate rustling sound. I look behind to my left. Coming from the driveway between the houses is a little kid in a dirty tank top holding a traffic cone. They stop behind one of the bushes and stare at me.
Ahmad and Roman are still carrying the duffel bag by its straps. For God’s sake, move faster. It’s just money, how heavy can it be?
The child is still looking at me. There wasn’t fear in their eyes, and they showed no sign of distress. Just… a look of contempt. Like we were a pack of bullies in a schoolyard. They clearly wanted us gone, but also knew their will was worth nothing. It was a look of resentment.
Ahmad and Roman finally drop the second duffel bag next to the first. They straighten their backs and face the seven men, waiting for them to take the cash.
The man in the middle looks at the bags and then at Ahmad. “Well? Let’s see it.”
Ahmad snorts. “Sure thing, Batman.”
He kneels down to the duffel bag he just dropped and searches for the zipper. He keeps feeling around, but it doesn’t appear.
Roman looks around behind the bag. “Zipper is on this side.”
Ahmad tries to turn the bag around, tugging at the corner with all the force he can muster. Roman pushes it with his foot to help. Once it’s facing vertically, he starts pushing at the other end, making easier work of it.
Having successfully rotated the bag to face him, Ahmad grabs the zipper and pulls it half open.
Any second now. This will be over any second now.
He opens up the bag, but I can’t see inside it past his body.
My hand is scratching at my pants for the phone in my other pocket. I think I feel it vibrating for a split-second, but it was just my leg shivering.
Come on. Get it over with.
Ahmad pulls out a crumbled ball of white paper.
…What is that?
I look back to the child. The look of resentment is gone. They’re staring at something past us. They point out in the distance.
I turn my head to the right. Across the field of grass, there are some bushes and small trees outside of the former property lines. Wait… there’s a figure approaching from behind them. It’s running at us with something in its arms.
They emerge into the field, and I see the man carrying an assault rifle.
Lennox.
I froze.
He fired the first shot. Eclipse fired the second. And then there were over a dozen shots ringing out at once.
All I could see were eleven people scattering around the street, but their faces became blurred. Everything became blurred.
I stayed frozen. I had no idea what to do or where to go. I slowly backed away, feeling my pockets and whizzing my head around. Then a bullet crashed into the asphalt between my feet. My brain turned off, and the military training took over.
I turned around and sprinted to the truck, slid past, and rolled behind it. Another bullet shattered the front light inches away from me. Shards of glass danced across the road and beside my legs. I quickly crawled to the middle of the truck, leaning against the back seat door.
The blitz of gunfire calmed down. Roman, Ahmad, and Kane were nowhere I could see. If they’re not dead, they’re in cover. So is everyone else. I heard more scuttling down the road. A wave of pistol shots and automatic fire broke at the same moment. Is the assault rifle Lennox or Eclipse?
Somebody yelled from at least a dozen yards away, and three pistol shots broke out, but I didn’t hear them collide.
More automatic fire sprayed out, hitting the Eclipse cars and shattering the windows. Glass broke somewhere farther away, possibly one of the houses. One of the bullets went through the passenger window next to me but didn’t shatter it. The firing spree continued until the clip emptied, and two pistols fired immediately.
Another moment of quiet. And then that moment was shattered. Gunshots from a multitude of sources fired from a much wider radius, putting more bullets into the cars and inspiring a round of indistinct untranslatable shouting.
Then one of the car engines started. The shooting changed direction as the engine revved, with at least a dozen shots going through the glass. The revving stopped, and a few seconds later I saw the car’s nose slowly drift into view a few feet away from the truck. The driver wasn’t visible, but definitely dead.
I heard footsteps from very close by. To my right, somebody ran past the truck and rushed for cover between the houses. I got a look at his face when he turned my direction, and he wasn’t an ally. He saw me too.
Before he lifted his arm up and pointed his pistol at me, my arm whipped out and shot him first. His head snapped and he fell dead on his back.
As the firing behind me continued, I stared at the man I shot. I could see the blood leaking from his head onto the concrete that the kid was standing on only a moment ago. The soldier in me steadily turned off, and I was left in a vivid state of mind, staring at a man I just killed.
Nobody in the distance was shooting any less, but the amount of people shooting kept decreasing. Only one assault rifle was firing, as were either three or four pistols. They shot continuously for another few seconds, shattering more car glass, and then one pistol stopped beyond the amount of time it would take to reload.
The assault rifle paused. I heard loud running coming in my direction. The assault rifle fired again, and the sound of running was replaced by a body crashing on the pavement.
Only one pistol and the assault rifle were shooting now. Who was behind either, I couldn’t tell.
The rifle unloaded for five seconds into one car, then went empty. The pistol fired three times at another car. The rifle quickly shot back. One more pistol shot, and the battle fell silent.
And it remained silent.
No footsteps. No movement. No sound other than the wind and the still-running car engine.
I broke my gaze from the dead man in the driveway. More seconds past, and I still heard nothing.
Is it safe? Can I leave cover now?
I kept waiting. And kept waiting. I glued my eyes shut, leaving me in the perfect vulnerable state if one of the Eclipse men survived.
But nothing happened. The silence remained how it was. The ringing in my ears calmed, and I opened my eyes again.
You’re on Brightwood Street, East Cleveland. You were sent to deliver four million dollars to Eclipse agents to make peace. And you just survived a shootout with them. What now?
I gently scooted onto my feet, still ducking under the truck, and walked to the front of it over tiny shards of glass. I peaked over the side, and the first thing I saw was Ahmad just a couple feet away. I grabbed his arm and pulled his body behind the truck. He was shot clean in the head when the fighting began. No pain. I hope you’re with your brother now. I’m sorry.
I stood and walked around the front of the truck. The Eclipse guy I heard get shot is sprawled on the ground next to the duffel bags, with three bullet holes in his back. I knelt down to look inside the bag Ahmad opened. It was filled with thousands of crumbled sheets of office paper. I dug deeper inside and found three bricks in the center. The money got switched out. You son of a bitch, Lennox.
I looked to the field that Lennox came from and saw his body in the grass, not much closer to us than he was when I first saw him. He died quickly.
The car that tried to drive off was still running, the front and back windshields completely shattered. Through the passenger window I saw the third dead Eclipse guy inside, leaning against the door with blood flowing down it.
Ahead were the other three cars. Immediately, I noticed a fourth Eclipse body lying next to the closest car on the left. He too must have been one of the first to get shot. As I walked down the road, I also noticed the shadow of another body on the left side of the car.
I walked to it to find Roman lying on the sidewalk. He wasn’t as lucky as Ahmad. The fatal bullet went through his neck, and he died grasping at it, lying on his side. I turned him over on his back and closed his eyes.
Farther ahead past the two cars on Forest Hill Avenue, a fifth Eclipse guy must have tried running through the field and into the trees, only to get shot in the back halfway there.
At the Forest Hill car on the right, a sixth Eclipse casualty lies with only half his body out of cover, assault rifle still in hand. At the car on the left, the seventh lies next to the back bumper, likely shot trying to rush the other side.
And between both those cars is Kane. Lying on his back, and… moving.
I sprinted to him. He had two bullet holes in his shoulder and chest. Another shot went in one side of his mouth and out the other. I picked him up under his arms, dragged him to the car on the right, and sat him up against it. He was breathing heavily and losing a lot of blood. He doesn’t have much time left.
He spat out the blood in his mouth and whispered, “Get the—” He spit again. “Get… the bags, and—” He stopped to take a deep breath. “Take the bags and go. Now!”
The bags… I looked behind me. But they’re still loaded with that paper shit, I can’t just—
Kane grabbed my arm and said a little louder, “Adrian! Go!”
Fuck. Fuck! I don’t have time for this!
I ran back to the bags, zipped them both open fully, and tried to shake them out. Hundreds of scraps of crumbled paper caught the growing wind and flew down the street as I pulled out clumps of them as fast as possible. I tossed aside the bricks, and picked up the bags one at a time and flung them up and down, unleashing a growing torrent of paper that filled every inch of airspace as it blew across the empty street. Once they were empty enough, I packed one bag inside the other and zipped it up.
I took one last look back at Kane, at Roman, and at Ahmad.
God damn you. Why was it me? Why did you leave me and not one of them?
What the fuck is wrong with you?! Why did you make this happen?!
I’m not ready to pick up the pieces of this. But there’s no other choice.
Just go.
Just go. Just go!
Get out! Get the fuck out of here!
I slung the bag over my shoulder and sprinted away, following the storm as it led me back where I came from.
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