Rapid footsteps echo through the hallway, bouncing between linoleum floors and white brick walls. Rach is pretty sure that the group had discussed the fact that stealth was, more or less, the name of the game here. And yet, she finds herself sprinting to keep up with Cannon, who seems to be incapable of anything other than sprinting and being loud. Anyone else in any part of the building who happened to have ears would surely have heard them by now, which, again, Rach is almost certain runs antithetically to the plan they had all come up with less than five minutes ago. With Cannon still several paces in front of her, though, she doesn’t have a whole lot of choice other than to keep on sprinting and hoping that the entirety of the prison guard staff just assumes that there’s a lively game of patty cake going on across the compound.
“Hey,” Rach says in a voice that’s somewhere between a shout, a whisper, and a defeated pant. She’s largely past the hangover at this point, but the sprinting isn’t doing her head any favors. “Shouldn’t we be being, you know, sneaky?”
Cannon turns his head around to respond, but his body doesn’t seem to care because he just keeps on running forwards while he talks. “Yeah, we can’t let the guahds know we’ah out.”
Mercifully, Cannon ends up running into a wall where the hallway turns to the right. The pizza boy staggers backwards a bit, wondering where this mysterious barrier of white painted brick materialized from, giving Rach a second to double over and put her hands on her knees. “Maybe we can try not sprinting everywhere?”
Cannon scrunches his face up a few times and checks for a bloody nose, despite the fact that it was the back corner of his head that hit the wall. “Who’s sprinting?”
“What? You, dude. You are. And you don’t even know where you’re going.”
Cannon nods. “Yeah, guess I am pretty fuckin’ fast, eh? Fastest guy in Camp Trin, that’s for sure.”
Rach laughs. There’s something endearing about the fact that Cannon’s brain and body seem to be operated by three prepubescent gnomes with varying degrees of ADHD. She shakes her head. “Yeah, pretty fuckin’ fast. How about we let me go in front from now on? And how about we try to walk way up high on our tippie little toes?”
Cannon rolls his eyes. He rubs the back of his head, finally locating the spot that actually made contact with the wall. “I’m not a kid, kid.”
“Yeah, whatever. Let’s keep our voices down too, mmkay? Inside voices? Quiet coyote?” She forms her hand into a little coyote shape, her middle two fingers pressed against her thumb and her outer fingers up like ears at attention.
“Yeah, yeah,” Cannon says with a smile. “Quiet coyote.”
To Rach’s surprise, he seems to understand. He extends one arm in front of him, like a gentleman beckoning a lady to enter the limousine first. Rach responds with a curtsy, and they proceed to walk slowly down the rest of the hallway.
She whispers, “Hey, so, it was pretty cool what you did back there.”
“What, run into a wall? Kid, if you think that’s cool, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“What? No. That was embarrassing. You should be embarrassed about that. I mean back at the bar. Last night. Not a lot of people would’ve stood up to Daisy Montego like that.”
“Yeah, well, probably helped that I had no idear who she was.”
“Right, but that kinda makes it even cooler, you know? Someone did something wrong, you stood up and made the situation right.”
“You’ah makin’ it sound like I’m some kinda hero just cause I whipped the shit outta some kid who didn’t pay me money. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a hero and you’ah damn right for callin’ me one. But that shit last night? Nah. That was nothin’. Just business.”
“Yeah, well, it was pretty cool business. Most business I see is a bunch of low lives placing bets on how many shots the other low lives can take before they’re unconscious. It’s cool to see someone with their shit together.”
“Kid, you got a low ass bah for that. I’m a pizza boy. I make pizza. I delivah pizza. I eat pizza. I’m just a guy, I dunno what you want from me.”
“I know a lot of ‘just a guys’ who wouldn’t do what you did. If they get shafted one way or another, they just chalk it up to bad luck and buy another drink. Rinse, repeat. Why fix the situation when they could just stop thinking about it?”
“Sounds depressin’ as shit.”
“Yeah, well, that’s Camp Trin for you. Or, at least, that’s my little slice of it. My family, I guess.” She employs a very heavy use of air quotes when saying the word “family.”
Cannon scoffs. “Your family sounds about as fucked up as our little Maraudah friend’s. Must be somethin’ in the watah around heah.”
“Yeah, it’s called alcohol. And depression. Whatever, everyone’s family is fucked up. I mean, come on. You gonna tell me that the pizza boy who spends his days whacking bugs has a good and healthy family back home?”
“Hell yeah I do. Well, yeah, not back home. Well, no, yeah, Mar and Pops ah back home, but, yeah, not really. And my sistah, yeah, she’s cool, she’s around, she’s just not home. It’s complicated, alright?” Cannon’s voices flares up a bit at that last part.
“Oh.” Rach realizes that she’s maybe pushed a button that she didn’t mean to push. Out of awkwardness, and out of a desire to not have Cannon’s voice continue to escalate as it so naturally seems to do, she takes a moment to survey the area. A long stretch of hallway in front of them. She scans the various closed doors up and down the hall. They’re getting close. “So, uh,” she stutters, trying to keep her voice low and non-judgmental, “You’re from Old Boston, right?”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Well, I don’t remember a ton from last night, but I do remember you mentioning it eight or nine different times. That and your accent is, like, insanely heavy. Sack of bricks heavy.”
“I don’t have an accent.”
“What? Yeah, you 100% do-- oh, oh, right. Right, we’ve been over this. No accent. You talk, yeah, you talk very normal.”
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“Yeah, wicked noahmal.”
“Yeah-- that. So, I guess I just got lucky guessing that your family is from Old Boston.”
“Oh, they’ah not from theah. I am. They’ah not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Pops found me up in Old Boston, but he’s from up noath, somewheah along the watah. Mar and my sistah, they’ah from, hell, I dunno, somewheah out west. They all came out to Old Boston, and, wham, we got ahselves a Life With Derek situation goin’ on.” I should note for anyone who’s never heard of Life With Derek, it’s basically a rip-off of The Brady Bunch. Except, in this version of our world, The Brady Bunch was a minorly successful sitcom that was forgotten not too long after it went off the air. Life With Derek, on the other hand, was an international success that lasted nine seasons. The fact that this version of Earth is infested with zombie bug monsters is almost less significant than this odd little Brady Bunch/Life With Derek mix-up, depending on who you ask.
“New family?” Rach asks, nodding because she fully understands the reference to the hit Canadian TV sitcom Life With Derek that neither she nor anyone else she knows has ever seen. “What happened to your old family?”
“Hold up.” Cannon reaches out and grabs Rach, pulling them both to a stop. Rach is about to ask a follow up question about Cannon’s Life With Derek situation back home -- and, just to be clear, although Life With Derek is firmly entrenched in the global zeitgeist of this Earth, it is entirely irrelevant to the events that will unfold in this novel and in all novels beyond this one, I’m just mentioning it so it makes sense why Cannon referenced it -- just as Rach is about to ask another question, she realizes why Cannon is now pressing Rach against the wall with the back of his forearm.
Footsteps.
There’s a four way intersection in the hallway just a few yards in front of them. Rach and Cannon both press themselves as flat against the wall as they can. They don’t so much as breath. They just listen. The footsteps are getting louder, coming from the hallway at the right turn of the intersection. Now that the two of them are quiet, they can also hear voices.
One of the voices says, “So I look at him and I say, those are my pants you’re wearing!”
The second voice breaks out into uproarious laughter. “Oh man, oh man. High school reunions are crazy.”
“Aren’t they, though?”
Cannon and Rach both surmise that there are two people coming down the hallway. They also both surmise that those two people are prison guards. They also also surmise that they have about five seconds until those two people will reach the intersection between the hallway they’re walking down and the hallway that Cannon and Rach are in. This means that, in about five seconds, Cannon and Rach are going to have to do something. Fight, run, negotiate. Something.
Neither of them are really planners by nature, but Rach at least wants to have some kind of rough idea of how to handle the situation. It’s difficult to plan anything, though, because they need to stay quiet enough to keep the element of surprise. On top of that, Cannon and Rach are still more or less strangers. They don’t have any experience fighting with each other, so they can’t really predict what the other will do or rely on the other to fall into regular fighting patterns. On top of that, Cannon has just decided that he’s come up with his own plan, and he’s already jumped out from behind the corner and is doing something that Rach can no longer see from her vantage point. She silently mouths something along the lines of dude, what the fuck before she decides that there’s no longer any point in hiding herself. She steps out into the crossroads between the hallways and sees what the hell Cannon is doing.
Turns out, neither Cannon nor Rach have superhuman hearing. There are three guards, not two. One of them is currently on the floor with Cannon on top of him, pounding his face in. The other two guards are just getting over their initial disbelief at what’s happening and are starting to act. Right at the same time that Rach reveals herself, the two standing guards pull out their weapons: A sickle for one of them, a hammer for the other. Rach sees the hammer and the sickle and has no notable reaction to them because she’s never done any Marxist reading and she’s never heard of the Soviet Union -- yes, at this point in history, Joseph Stalin is less important than the cast of Disney Channel phenomenon Life With Derek. So, instead of pointing out the comedy in two working men fighting with the literal symbols of the working man, she puts her fists up like a boxer.
The guard with the sickle, who will henceforth be referred to as Sickle Guy, cocks his head backwards when he sees Rach. “Rachel? What are you doing?”
“Sorry, Gary.” She shoots a few jabs at Sickle Guy, who friends and family call Gary but who will still be called Sickle Guy here, before finishing the combo with a hell of a right hook. The punch lands clean on his jaw, staggering him. Hammer Guy, who was just as confused as Sickle Guy to see Rach outside of her cell, rushes at her. He swings his hammer down at her, then a few times across his body. She ducks and weaves through all of them. Cannon, who has now sufficiently eliminated the possibility of the third guy (whose Christian name is indeed Third Guy) ever voicing any sort of alarm ever again, gets to his feet. Sickle Guy tries to join in the fight against Rach, but Cannon intervenes.
Sickle Guy hacks and slashes at Cannon, who instinctively puts his arm up to block where his pads would be. His brain catches up with his body a split second too late, and he’s rewarded with a deep gash along his left arm. He howls in pain, then retaliates by smacking Sickle Guy across the face. It’s a wild, untrained strike, but it does the job well enough for now. He presses his arm against his body to try to slow the bleeding.
Sickle Guy stumbles backwards against the wall. He watches Hammer Guy continue to strike unsuccessfully against Rach. “Seriously, Rachel, cut the shit. I don’t know what you’re trying, but it isn’t gonna work.”
Instead of giving Rach a chance to respond, Cannon delivers a piping hot knuckle sandwich directly to Sickle Guy’s mouth, which shuts him up for good. The pizza boy shakes out his hand then kisses his knuckles. “Damn, Rach, you really ah a regulah here, huh?”
She ducks left from a blow from the hammer. “Yeah, I kinda drink a lot.”
“So you know all of these guahds?”
“Grew up with most of ‘em. Back then they called me the village idiot, now they call me the town drunk. It’s got its perks, though. Know my way around a fight.” Hammer Guy is getting tired. He launches a big overhead strike that Rach easily dodges. Then, catching him off balance, she delivers two rapid jabs to his gut followed by an uppercut that sends him careening back into the wall.
Cannon is nothing if not impressed. He also knows his way around a fight, but he’s not much better than the average Joe unless he has his gear on him. Rach, on the other hand, doesn’t have anything other than her fists and she looks to be about as lethal as he is fully armed. Her punches are lightning fast. There’s hardly any time between wind up and delivery. Her ducks and dodges are just as quick. Hammer Guy staggers back into the fight and tries to land a blow, but before he knows it, Rach is behind him. She jabs the back of his head, and he falls face first against the linoleum.
“Gotta admit,” she says, pushing some hair behind her ear, “That feels pretty good. These guys have always been assholes to me. Not for no reason. I’m an asshole to them, too. But I can’t help it. I’m just an asshole.”
“You know, you oughta be nicah to yourself. I bet your family wouldn’t like hearin’ you talk about yourself like that.”
Rachel laughs. “My family would be saying even worse shit about me and about all the rest of them. They really don’t give a shit. None of us have anything to give a shit about.”
“So what the hell ah you doin’ this for? You said it yourself back theah, these people know you. You tell ‘em that you’ah not paht of that Maraudah girl’s plans, they’ll probably believe you. You could be back at the bah by the mornin’.”
She shrugs. “I dunno. Seems like fun, I guess.”
“Yeah fuckin’ right.” He shakes out his hand. “Look, I love fighitn’ as much as the next guy, but this shit hurts. Don’t tell me that you’ah not hurtin’ aftah landin’ those punches. For you to be goin’ along with this whole thing, you gotta have a good reason for it.”
Rach cracks her knuckles, then crosses her arms and tucks her hands up into her armpits. “These people know me, but I don’t think it’s how you think it is. I could tell them the truth, tell them them I had nothing to do with Tay killing Diaz. That I’ve never met her or you or Lex before in my life. But they wouldn’t care. Nobody ever cares what I say. I told you. I’m Rach the drunk. Rach the idiot. Just one of about thirty bastard children in town who suck on the booze filled titty of our adopted mom, the bartender.”
“Weiahd metaphoah.”
“Point is, me and mine? Nobody takes us seriously. Nobody cares about us. Hell, we don’t even care about us. The guards here, they’d throw me up in a noose with the three of you without batting an eye. Also, honestly, it’s kinda nice being around you guys. I don’t wanna be, like, insanely sappy and trite, but, being around people who give a shit about themselves? And who maybe give a shit about me? It’s kinda nice. Kinda like I’ve got my own little--”
“--your own little family?”
Rach snorts. “Yeah. Guess being locked up together for a day can do that, huh?”
Cannon grins. “Well, I don’t know if I’d go so fah as to say we’ah a family. I mean, you? Yeah, you’ah cool as shit. Those othah two? Spoiled brat and a killah psycho. If we ah a family, we ah one incredibly badly fucked up family.”
“Yeah, well,” she’s about to say something, then thinks better of it. She retracts her hands from her armpits and breathes on them to warm them up. Stretches out her fingers. “Well, we should keep moving. The closet with everyone’s stuff is pretty close.”
“Yeah, right.” They walk down the hallway a bit before Cannon speaks up again. “Yo, Rach.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not sayin’ that we’ah family. You know, I got my own family, I’m not in the mahket for anothah. But if we were family,” he drifts off, trying to think of the right words. “If we were family, you’d have a brothah who’s sick and tired of his sistah talkin’ shit about herself. Got it?”
She smiles. “Got it.”
“Good.”
“And I’m not saying that we are, but if we were, you know, family, then you’d have a sister who thinks that her brother should keep an open mind about making new families. It’s okay to have more than one at a time. Who knows? That second family could end up being pretty cool.”
“Yeah.” He nods a few times, not necessarily to Rach. He starts to say something more, but he stops. He looks around and cups his hand to his ear. Footsteps. More guards. He looks at Rach. She nods at him and cracks her knuckles.