By the time my last class had finished, it was dark outside and the almost empty campus was being lit by hundreds of dim lampposts. I went outside and began walking towards the campus’ main exit, a large building in the shape of an arch that connected the inside of the university with Chacabuco, one of Concepcion’s main streets.
“Hey!” Someone said behind me.
“Hey…” I answered to the owner of the voice. “How’s it going? Had a good day?”
“Normal.” Said Damian, slowing down as he reached my side. “So many boring classes today, you?”
I shrugged. “Boring classes galore, too. Lopez’ class was the only fun one.”
“And it’s so late now.” He said looking at the night sky. “It should be illegal to make us come to class this late, even Adi gets out before us…”
We stopped by the bus stop outside the university campus and waited for busses to come. It was late, so not many were moving through the city.
Damian told me about his day and was mid sentence through telling me something about free radicals or something when the bus he took home stopped in front of us. “Don’t stay up too late!” He said as he jumped to the bus.
“Huh?” I answered as I looked at him, but he didn’t say anything else and the bus went away, I could see a half smile in his face before he went outside my range of vision.
‘Does he know’ I asked myself as I turned to walk towards the city center, but I didn’t get an answer, so I just pulled my hoodie up and started moving.
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After my encounter with Minotaur, This is how my life had been. I woke up every morning and went to Uni, where I stayed most of the day.
After classes ended, I went with my friends to the city center and, when everyone went home, I would give some excuse and stay behind or just take a different bus and stop one stop later and walk back to the city and loiter around until the sun went down.
Or in days like this one, where I finished my classes when it was already late, I would just go directly to the big park near to campus and looked for a very large tree in the outskirts of the park… a tree away from light… and people…
“Thanks for having me.” I said placing a hand on a large tree’s log as I moved my head around to see if anyone was nearby.
When I was able to confirm that no one was near, I got down into a crouch and looked up, right towards the the space above in between two thick branches, I aimed and… jumped.
For a second I felt myself floating in the air and a fraction of a second later, I was landing on a thick branch more than three meters up from the ground. Maybe you could say that the last two weeks had been uneventful and that I wasted my time walking around town for nothing, but you could not deny that I had gotten better at jumping up trees.
The rust that had settled on my Ignition after years of disuse, was finally starting to come off. And it made me feel alive.
I just felt right to use it.
As if I should have never stopped in the first place.
I sat in the embrace of the leaves and took off my backpack. From a hollow part of the tree trunk I took out a watertight bag and opened it.
As I always came to this tree to change, it had felt right to store my things in there. Slowly, trying to not make much sound, I began to change my clothes.
As I took off my clothes, I began to put on the clothes I stored in the bag. A full body suit that I had bought at a bike shop, a pair of loose jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt on top of that to hide it and a leather jacket on top of the shirt, a pair of nice running shoes, that was the look I had gone for, something that helped me both blend in a bit while also being able of giving me some protection, from scrapes at least. After placing my backpack inside the watertight bag, I took out the last piece of my equipment, a pair of yellow biker goggles I’d bought to replace the green ones, and placed them in my jacket’s breast pocket.
I wasn’t stupid enough to keep the green ones with me, not with the possibility of the heroes having a way of finding them. I had dropped them in the river later that same day.
I didn’t like yellow that much either, but they were the only ones they had.
I looked down the tree and checked that there was no one close by and jumped down, leaving my backpack behind. This had been what I’d been doing for the past two weeks. After classes ended and everybody else had gone home, I wondered the streets looking for something to help with.
Not like much had happened though.
The most interesting thing that had happened was that one time I helped a lady get up after she tripped.
I left the park and went towards the city center and past it. Normally around that time you could find one or two Heroes doing rounds around the main plaza and main street, so I usually went a bit further back, to the streets beyond the city center where Heroes were rarely seen.
And then I walked, waiting for something to happen.
I had walked for around thirty minutes when I heard a yelp from one street over. I ran towards the sound and before turning the corner, I managed to avoid crashing into a man in black running in the other direction. I wanted to look at the man, but whoever was it that was in pain needed my help first.
I turned the corner and saw him. Laying against an old, dilapidated stone wall, was a young man around 15 years old, holding his side.
“Hey!” I said, getting close to him. “Are you OK?”
I heard him grunt and I saw blood seeping from beneath his hand. “Shit!” I said. This wasn’t something I could, realistically, take care of. “Let me call for an ambulance…”
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I placed my hand in my pocket and noticed my phone wasn’t there. ‘Of course it isn’t, you idiot!’ I said to myself. ‘You left it back at the tree!’
“No…” He whispered. “No ambulances… No hospitals… please…”
The boy looked at me and, using his other hand, pulled the bandanna that covered his… snout.
There wasn’t any other way of describing it. Where a human would normally have a mouth, he had a snout that looked like that of a dog, protruding canines and all.
I looked around as he covered his face with the bandanna again and saw an old man in the other side of the phone talking frantically into his cell phone as he looked at us.
“Shit!” I said. “It’s never easy, is it?”
I grabbed onto the neck gaiter I had tied to the body suit and pulled it up to my nose where it should be able to stay thanks to the straps I had added to keep it tied to my ears. I pulled the yellow bike goggles out of my pocket and placed them over my eyes. “Hold onto that, OK?” I said, taking off my jacket and white shirt and handing the latter to him. “I’ll need you to keep pressure on the wound.”
The dog-boy gave me an apprehensive gaze but nodded and pressed the shirt against his wound, quickly drenching it with blood.
“Ok, this might hurt, but I need you to stay still.” I bent down and brought one arm underneath his legs and the other behind his back. I was going to princess carry him out of there.
I thanked myself for staying fit all of these years as I lifted him off the pavement. He wasn’t that heavy, but he wasn’t really what you could call light, either. “Hey!” I heard someone yell behind me. “Put the man down!”
I glanced back and saw a pair of policemen running past the old man as they drew their weapons. ‘Of course they would make it in no time when I’m trying to help someone.’ I said to myself looking away from them and running off.
I felt the energy rush into my legs when I called for it and soon, I was picking up speed. I heard a gunshot ring in my direction and I felt gravel hit my back. “Ok, buddy,” I said more to myself than to the boy. “Better keep it together!”
I heard the boy grunt as I sped up, but I didn’t stop, not now that I had the police in my trail.
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I finally stopped behind an empty house almost 10 blocks from where we had started after I felt like I had managed to loose the policemen that were following me in bikes. I placed the boy down, gathered my breath and checked on him. “You OK, bud?” I asked.
He grunted and kept pressing the wound, the shirt was now bright red, he was loosing a lot of blood. “OK, don’t move from here.” I said. “I’m gonna go look for something to clean that up.”
I jumped on top of the house’s roof and looked around. About three houses from where I stood, someone had left their clothes out to dry. A bad choice both knowing that we were in mid winter and because I was about to steal them.
I jumped the fences that separated me from the clothing line and grabbed a big, pure white bed sheet. I was about to leave when I heard the back door click open. I turned around slowly and saw an old woman with crazy looking white hair wearing a white gown pointing a knife towards me. “Don’t move!” She said. “I’m calling the police!”
I looked at her, she was the old lady I had helped a few days before, though that time I hadn’t been wearing my mask, so there was no way she would recognize me.
“Please…” I said. “Please don’t… There’s a kid… He’s bleeding, I need to stop the bleeding…” I said.
“Let the paramedics take care of it, then!” She said.
I looked down at the bed sheet in my hands. “I… I can’t.” I whispered, raising my eyes to look at her. “He’s… He’s like me…”
She opened her eyes in understanding. “Oh…”
“Please…” I said.
Our eyes connected for a few seconds and she put the knife down. “Where is he…” She said.
I opened my eyes, surprised. “I… I don’t…”
“Where… is… he…” She said, her voice strong.
“A couple of houses from here.” I said.
“Can you bring him here?” She asked. “I will take a look at the wound.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “You would be helping two ignited.”
She smiled. “I am a nurse… It’s my job to help the wounded…” She looked down at her trembling, wrinkled hands and at the knife between her fingers. “Or at least it was…” Her eyes locked into mine once more, a fire building up inside of them. “But there’s still enough inside of me to help a wounded kid…”
I nodded. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I said, letting go of the bed sheet and jumping away.
After scolding the kid for trying to run away while still bleeding out, I was able to carry him back to the old lady’s home and into a sofa inside her house that she had covered with the white cover.
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“I’ll heal…” Said the kid through gritted teeth. “I heal fast…”
The old lady shushed him as she poured some more alcohol in the open wound, prompting a yelp from the kid. “There’s no healing from an infection.” She said. “You still need help, even if your condition does make you stronger.”
The boy looked away and closed his eyes as the old lady began to thread a needle with surgical suture. “Let’s thank god I still had some thread left.”
Meanwhile, I sat down in an old arm chair and waited. I could have left after leaving the kid with her, after all, she told me so, but something told me to stay. Call it camaraderie between ignited, maybe.
“So, what should I call you, boy?” The old lady asked.
The dog-boy gave her a side glance and then closed his eyes once more. “Hey.” I said. “Answer the lady.”
“What for.” He said. “She’ll just look down on me like all the others.”
“She’s helping you, kid.” I said. “The least you owe her is your name, or a nickname at least.”
The boy looked at me and then to the lady. “Lupus…” He said. “My frie… people call me Lupus…”
The lady looked up at the boy, who took his bandanna off and showed her his face. “It’s because I look like… this…” He added.
“I… wasn’t asking for a nickname, boy.” She said, barely showing any reaction to his face. “What’s your name.”
The boy put on his bandanna again and looked to the ceiling and stayed silent for a few seconds as the lady finished dressing up his wound, as if he was trying to remember something he had long forgotten. “Mario…” He said with a tired voice. “Mario’s my name.”
The lady smiled as she stood up and placed a cover over his body. “I had a friend at Uni called Mario…” She said. “And he was a fine young man, just like I’m sure you are…”
I couldn’t be sure, but I think I saw tears forming in his eyes as he closed them down, falling asleep.
The old lady waited for a few seconds, almost like counting the boy's breaths, and then waved towards the back door an went out, I followed.
“That was a nasty knife wound he had.” She said. “Any idea how he got it?”
I looked at her and then to the ground. “No… “Sorry… I found him like that by the side of a street, bleeding out…” I said, careful of not talking about the man in black.
“Mmh…” She mumbled. “He’s lived a bad life… He needs help…”
I looked at her. “But the government, you know what they do to rogues like us… and he’s, you know… They would do everything in their hands to make him… normal…” I whispered, a shiver running through my back, horrified with the idea.
She glanced at me. “Yes…” She said. “The government wasn’t what I was thinking…” She sighed. “He’ll stay with me… or at least I’ll try to make him stay…”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “You’d be putting yourself in danger.”
She smiled. “I’ve been through my share of danger.” She said. “This isn’t the first power hungry government I’ve lived through… I still have some fight in me…”
I looked at her, her white curls blowing in the air and saw the aura of someone who the boy could be safe with… if he decided to stay, that is…
I walked to the middle of the yard. “I need to go,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
“I didn’t get your name, boy.” She said.
I smiled behind my mask. “I don’t have a name.” I said. “Not yet, at leat.”
She smiled. “Well, you can come here if you ever need help and when you get one, you can tell it to me. The police doesn’t come much through these places, you’ll be safe here.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“You are welcome.” She said, some fear showing in her eyes. Fear not for her, but for me. “Be safe, boy.”
I nodded again. “I will.” I said.
And jumped.
I took the long way back to my stuff and by the time I made it back home, the sun was rising in the horizon.
I had a fast breakfast and shower and headed back out.
I had classes in the morning.