Like some kind of spiritual probation
The cracked concrete popped under the tires and all the sounds of the city became razor-sharp. Gradie’s ears picked up gunfire, but half a second later it was just the rev of an engine, or a piece of gravel hitting the undercarriage. As he wrestled with his breathing, EP’s voice came over the earbuds, soft as a shadow on snow.
“Radio chatter the moment he walked out the door. Trying to pin down their locations right now.”
“Stay about a light behind them,” Michael said, like ordering lunch.
“Roger roger,” Sam said, and swung the SUV out of the lot. On the navigator in the dash, Celeste’s Beetle was marked by a blinking dot, stuck at a light. Philip and Michael's vehicle, marked by another dot, was pulling around the back street between the college and the river, heading towards the road a few blocks ahead of the Beetle. Gradie gripped the stock of his rifle through the bag and looked out the window.
His legs were half numb from sitting so long in the SUV, and he was thirsty and had to piss, but the adrenaline rising up his tongue pushed every other feeling down somewhere ignorable. He was acutely aware of his flesh and unable to separate himself from it. If a bullet ripped into his leg, could he pry his mind away from the agony? Could he handle being trapped in his body, locked in with the pain, unable to retreat to the winding hallways and the ghostly flesh of the Otherworld?
Luke spoke suddenly and Gradie almost pulled his rifle up right there.
“Alan, keep an eye on our six.”
There was none of the smooth playfulness in his voice that Gradie had grown used to, and somewhere in it, Gradie was reminded of his own mortality.
He turned and looked out the back window, scanning the stream of traffic behind for the sudden appearance of gun barrels, trying to remind himself that his own mortality had nothing to do with this world.
****
Cooper stared at the window glass without seeing anything but the swirling mess in his head, trying to separate the memories from the dreams. All the days spent skating around that parking garage. The half a semester flunked out while talking up girls and selling drugs at community college. The two years trying to play gangster or underworld shaker until a brief flash of violence had scared him back to rehab and his parent's condo and a string of retail jobs.
Someone had done all that. But someone had also been flying around a dark void in a ship made to look like a strip club folded in on itself, wrapped around a core of couches and cages.
He let that dream-memory ride for a moment.
The girls had been phantoms. Their skin and sex only felt real when he focused, when his mind could be coaxed to squeeze out memories that grafted themselves onto the ghost girls like fondant on a frame. Like liquor spilled on a marble counter, at once brilliant and aromatic, the memories evaporated once spent and left the ghost girls dancing their programmed routines, by now committed by all passengers to memory, until another dose of memories, maybe a girl seen yesterday behind the counter or waiting tables, was pulled out and fed to them.
One of the girls had been given the look and gestures of a college chick one of the guys had sold Adderall to one evening, the orange light on her skin clashing with the dark and neon of the ship, when that guy, one of their first marks, had warned Cooper of the Hardworlders.
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“They can make you think they know you, right? Like you’ve known them forever. They can be your brother, sister, even your mom. Lethal shit.”
“They can’t do that,” someone, maybe Rowland, had said. “You can’t fuck with genetics. Names and faces, man. They can’t be blood-related unless it’s that way in the Real.”
It felt like a dream barely remembered. Cooper let it slide out of frame while the woman driving in the seat next to him glanced over and worked up the courage to tell him something.
“So, some people asked about you about a week ago,” she said eventually. “They came to my work twice. Parked outside my house and waved at me when I came home, and then they just drove off.”
Who? His fence’s guys? Did Jared have guys? He thought about Jared sitting at the dining table of his cookie-cutter McMansion, pile of meter-long receipts and SKU tables next to him, and doubted he could even get his kids to grab him a beer out of the fridge.
“And now you’re taking me to them.” He said it without any malice, like he was announcing the next obvious plot twist in a movie they were both watching, but she freaked out anyway.
“Oh my god baby no! I just spent every dollar I had saved and took out all kinds of loans to bail you out! How can you say that?”
The car swerved in and out of the lane.
“Sure, whatever.” He counted the floors on a parking garage. It was the same number every time.
“God dammit Cooper!” she swerved into the far lane in a storm of horns and slammed on the brakes. Cooper looked out the window and sucked his teeth.
“This the place? I coulda walked.”
She made a kind of yelp and beat the steering wheel with her fists.
“I shouldn’t be doing this! I saw your job on the news and I just—” She twisted in her seat and bit back tears at the window. Her curves, intensified by her posture, and her soft cheek and slightly fanned out ears lifted old memories out of deep places, memories that melted and smoldered all around him. He shuffled in his seat. She froze suddenly.
“Just get out. If you don’t trust me, if you think I’m trying to sell you out, just go. I can’t handle it if you—” She dropped her chin and cried for real this time. He took his hand off the door handle and leaned closer to her.
“You didn’t have to do this. You should’ve just left me in jail. They can’t get me in there.”
“They said they could.” She sobbed.
He moved her hair behind her ear and she looked at him. He realized that until that moment they hadn’t really seen each other. They had made eye contact, said some words, but this was the first time it was just them, and not two masks.
He broke the silence first.
“So, where are we going.” He put some softness in his voice.
She wiped her face with her hands, took a breath and flicked on her blinker like she was arming a bomb.
“Someplace safe. I have a relative that deals with this type of stuff.”
“Who?”
“An in-law. Ok?” She pointed her glittering eyes at him. “Will you let me do this?
“All right.” He squeezed her hand and she smiled at him.
They pulled back into the traffic and it embraced them like forgiveness. For a blistering moment he felt safe, swaddled in layers of everyday normalcy. The drifting stupid clouds sliding somewhere oblique to the direction of the streets, the cars, even the lines in the buildings. Radio noise and bass thump, horns and breaks and engine groans, all blended throughout the jigsaw grid of cars. Saturday afternoon. Smell of grills and exhaust. Nothing violent could happen in a moment like this, he felt. It would be like an office cubicle spontaneously sprouting in a forest. The carnage back at the store was out of his memory, held back by the supremacy of the now, unable to shatter the sensation.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. She cut a sharp glance sideways as he took it out and her movement was predator like compared to the softness before. He had a text message from a number he didn’t have saved. He read it in the push notification and the world shifted again and his reality was wholly separate from the gentle banality of two seconds ago.
Kill that bitch next to you. We will take you in. You will tell us where the coin is. Then you can leave this Hardworld and spend the rest of your life fucking resort sluts instead of being trapped in the tunnels of Nightmare. Wake up! Otherworld. The Allclub. Hardworlders.”
He turned the screen off and set the phone down on his lap. They were stuck at a light, another fucking parking garage to his right, tacky new condos with fake faded brick to his left, and just the wide flat expanse of the river and the land beyond it ahead of them. He felt if they made it over the bridge they would keep on sliding across the surface of the earth until they glided off into the sky and eventually the Allclub would pop into view.
He took his knife out of his personals bag, tore the tape off, and flipped it open. Her voice was soft and scared, but there was something inside it that spoke of cold lethality.
“Baby, what are you doing with that knife?”