Fears in the rain

Cooper’s apartments were a single row of two-story eight-unit buildings a few blocks away from the POE, in a neighborhood where micro churches and sheet metal body shops and empty lots moved against sixty-year-old houses, like the last stages of a decay that could only end in some distant gentrification. The land sloped to the south towards the strip mall white noise of the main road, and downtown popped up to the east, just a glittering promise in the rain.

Nothing moved anywhere besides a hazy pair of headlights, swimming through the static shadows.

Lindsey killed the headlights and drove her bike up onto the darkened sidewalk under a broken streetlight and parked it beneath a massive bush of scarlet runner beans draping over a corner of plywood-paneled privacy fence that surrounded the back lot of a used car dealer. Sheltered under the dense fairyland boughs of the bush, she locked her helmet on the bike and waited as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

There was an empty corner lot with sloping sides like a ziggurat between her and the street below Coopers' apartments. Rainwater roared down a densely wooded gulch between one sloping side and back fence of the car lot, rushing into a storm gutter entrance sloshing below the sidewalk at her feet.

Rain pelted the sheet-metal covered parking with so much noise she expected it to cut off suddenly at any moment. A sound too heavy to sustain. The steady current of water streaming down to her from miles above felt like eyes watching. She checked in with her own eyes in the sky.

“Babe, I’m moving out.”

“You’re clear,” EP said.

She stepped out onto the sidewalk and the rain hit her like she had dove into some lively body of water. She tightened her poncho’s hood, pausing for a second to glance at the sky, hoping to see any of EP’s drones. She didn’t, and hadn’t expected to, but in the daytime those little black dots were always comforting. A shame EP had gotten better with the camo recently.

The empty lot was a dense mass of darkness on her right, and the distant streetlights could lay only broken shreds of amber at her feet, where water flooded down the thin weed-choked sidewalk and rolled over her boots. The road to her left was wide and dark, and not a single car passed from either way as she trudged uphill.

The apartments were across the street, up on a raised lot over ten feet above the street and sidewalk below, the earth boxed in by a flat concrete wall topped by steel railings and covered in rough amateur murals of cowboys and low riders, now only visible as memories of the surveillance photos. The flat boxes were framed against the sky by a light glaring in the back lot, and the amber squares of the windows, some showing the telltale signs of tweaker torn blinds, were the only signs she was still in the land of the living.

She crossed the street and continued uphill alongside the apartments in total darkness, another dead streetlight testifying to EP’s preparation, until she came to the half-lit parking lot at the back of the complex. She kept to the shadows and scanned the cars for tells that someone was waiting for her as she walked towards the back of the units. The parking lot was raised above the apartment ground level and separated by a low chain link fence.

She hopped down a cracked set of concrete steps and stopped in the walkway between two units. Water streamed off the clogged gutters above and splattered on the slim sidewalk and grass at her feet. She took a breath and scanned for signs she had been followed or noticed, and when she found none started up the metal steps towards unit 2676.

She had made it up two stairs when someone screamed in the downstairs unit, distinctly female. A man’s voice broke out in measured shouts that could have been matched to blows. She waited. Rain sound washed away the noise of the shouts. Lightning flashed and the sky was bright for a moment. Flowing streams of mirrored purple and dripping lines of silver marched towards some unseen darkness below the concrete. Then it was all dark again, the instant of light becoming a wall between the moment of the screams and now. It was too much.

She held the Walther in her hand and took up a bump key in the other. Bottoms of her shoes meeting flat faces of cement like praying hands and just as silent. Up against the door, she stopped. Her ears filtered through the storm sounds and singled out the voices. The mans, different now, a rolling anger, but even and un-pressurized. The woman repeated a handful of syllables like a reflex. She shook them at him in a linoleum sounding room, then closer to the door, then far away again.

Stolen novel; please report.

The Walther’s safety moved under Lindsey’s thumb. The man began repeating a name. His tone built up like a bomb falling. He said it like a thrust and Lindsey had the gun out. Her nerves set to that gyroscopic sensitivity. She felt a raindrop fall on the slide and traced it in her mind as it dripped down and off the point of the trigger guard. The bump key met the lock like completing a circuit. Then the sounds from the door, two-fold, changed in every way and Lindsey stepped past it, gun in pocket and bump key hidden, just as the woman opened the door and stepped out.

“Fuck you!” Her scream bounced off the walls and was chased by the door slam. A few seconds later, the man opened it and stood there with his chest leaned out, back of a bald head presented to Lindsey like a target.

“Venessa! Venessa! Fucking stupid—” The last words were a whisper and he disappeared like one back into the door. Lindsey stood in the rain, the world once again as it had been before the scream. Lightning flashed again like a sign.

“You ok?” EP Said, her voice unlike anything else in the world. Born into a soft room far away.

Lindsey didn’t want to speak. She didn’t feel she could whisper low enough. Remembering EP was watching, she looked up at the dense dripping black and made a thumbs up then went to the stairs. The rain opened up as she reached the top. She heard it spray the street and hum on a thousand roofs. The wind rushed through branches and wires and loose siding. The tops of cars gave up aluminum tones. In a few seconds, the lock gave and she was inside.

She flicked on her flashlight and scanned the living room with red light. Once she was sure it was clear, she locked the door behind her and moved to the other rooms. In about five minutes she was certain she was alone in the apartment, and she took it in.

The apartment was familiar in that distant way. Collapsing decades-old Ikea furniture and random pieces that stuck out like a kidnap victim at a rager. Wooden dresser in the living room. Tableless dining chairs in every corner piled with laundry and boxes of canned goods and other distinctly food bank borne groceries. The way the dishes were stacked in the kitchen, the way the bathroom had been meticulously packed and soiled, the cigarette burns and smoke stains in all the right places, the things taken in a moment of manic appraisal and left forgotten. Four vacuum cleaners. A multitude of framed hotel art. Solar panels ripped off attic fans. All the smells that came along expectantly like lyrical themes demanded by the rhythm. It all reminded her, nudged lose the memories.

Those hellish years glared at her, laser-like, from the dim smudge of memory now locked in the Real and lit up siblings in the slumbering history of the Self. Though for her Self, it had only been a few months at that house. She had been able to push at least that much.

Slowly, with focus, she wrapped the feelings up in the annoyance that the clutter would make the search that much worse, and wiped them away. The memories fell away like whispers in the rain, and there was only the Spirit, searching.

He could have left it anywhere. She reached out with her Spirit and tried to push it everywhere she looked. She picked up and shook every beer can, hoping to hear a quarter rattling inside, ripped open every fast food bag, turned over every couch cushion, opened up every game case and DVD. The mattresses, pillows, and other places that called for it, she used a Garrett handheld metal detector. Twice, she found other quarters, both with the wrong year. Here she was, an embodied Spirit crossing planes of existence like stepping through doors, hunting, and it all could be undone if he had stuck the quarter in a hot pocket package she neglected to check. She almost laughed out loud. If any of her mentors could see her now.

EP scanned the monitors and typed commands that sent the drones in pre-scripted flight routines. Her buds were tuned to the police radio. She picked up chatter of a possible break-in at the ‘burglary suspect’s home, and advice to proceed with caution.”

“Shit.”

She watched from an orbiting drone as two cop cars came down the main street about half a mile away. Typical. She had spent till 10 pm waiting for buzz on a search warrant and then they pull this shit. Definitely other Hardworlders in the police force.

She buzzed Lindsey.

“Cops coming down the street. Get out.”

Lindsey had moved into the bedroom, leaving the bathroom and hall closet disemboweled behind her, and started pulling drawers out. If it was here, leaving now would be a total waste.

“You sure they’re not just coming down the street?” she asked.

“No. I got the radio chatter—”

“Shit.” Lindsey drug the mattress off the box spring.

“April,”

“If they’re coming it might mean it's here.”

“It might have been a trap. They might have a lookout somewhere that I missed. Someone called it in—”

“No one saw me,” Lindsey hissed. Must have been a camera, or some kind of sensor she missed. If it had been a lookout, she would have felt it.

EP didn’t respond. Probably just as skeptical about Lindsey’s sixth sense as Philip had been.

She moved to the closet. Pockets and shoe boxes, battered luggage, gym bags.

“One parked in the street, south,” EP said. “Other two pulling in the lot.”

“Shit!” Lindsey put the light and detector in her pockets and got out her mask.

It was definitely a trap.